Sheila Heti Why does Wall Street appear so rarely in fiction? John Lanchester claims it’s because explaining the intricacies of high finance would bog down good storytelling. Explanation, he says, is “fine in small doses, as a dollop of rationale before the main course of drama, but anything longer and the reader wakes hours later to the familiar clanking noise of the milkman delivering bottles to the front door.” Salman Rushdie will chair this year’s PEN World Voices Festival, and participants will include Martin Amis, Colson Whitehead, and Marjane Satrapi. We were thrilled to see that Elevator Repair Service,
Roald Dahl Before his death last December, Christopher Hitchens was known for torching his intellectual adversaries. Vanity Fair interpreted this talent rather literally when they handed out Christopher Hitchens lighters at their Oscar party last weekend. Each quote came engraved with a Hitch quote, including our favorite: “Everyone has a book inside them, which is exactly where I think it should, in most cases, remain.” Slate launches the inaugural issue of the Slate Book Review today, a monthly review that will publish on the first Saturday of every month. To protest a bill passed last year in the Tucson,
Wayne Koestenbaum In response to the latest VIDA report, Emily Gould posits, at The Awl, an interesting theory about the paucity of women writing or getting reviewed in any of the “top” literary magazines. “Could it be,” she wonders, “that part of the imbalance is caused by the fact that women are choosing not to write for these magazines?” We just listened to two recent and excellent public-radio interviews, both available online: At L.A.’s Bookworm, host Michael Silverblatt talked with Wayne Koestenbaum about his book Humiliation (which Laura Kipnis wrote about here). And NPR’s Tom Gjelten interviews Timothy Snyder
VIDA has released their 2011 count of male-to-female ratios in literary magazines. A quick scroll down the page reveals the usual predominance of red: The color denoting the number of male authors who wrote for, or are reviewed by, publications like The Atlantic, Harper’s, and the TLS. Only two of the publications surveyed were not in the red: the Boston Review (9 women reviewed, 5 men), and Granta (34 women, 30 men; thanks in large part to their summer issue dedicated to feminism). Why does this sound so familiar? Oh, yeah. This year, the disheartening charts are adorned with
Jim Romenesko A new issue of n+1 film supplement N1FR is out, featuring Damion Searls on Margin Call, Christine Smallwood on Apichatpong “Joe” Weerasethakul (and on Herzognian caves), among other good things. To boot, the editor’s note begins with an apology: “This second edition of the N1FR, n+1’s film review, is very late,” writes A.S. Hamrah. “Its lateness has nothing to do with n+1 or with any of the contributors, or with our generous sponsor IFC Films. It’s entirely my fault.” Minnesota-based Graywolf Press and literary magazine A Public Space are embarking on a new collaborative publishing effort. According
Dmitri Nabokov Algonquin Books hopes to release legendary publisher Barney Rosset’s unfinished autobiography, tentatively titled The Subject Was Left-Handed, by the end of the year. Vladimir Nabokov’s son Dmitri Nabokov died in Vevey, Switzerland, last Wednesday at the age of seventy-seven. According to the Times, Dmitri was “a bon vivant, a professional opera singer, a race car driver and a mountain climber.” But he was best known as the executor of his father’s estate. After Vladimir’s death, Dmitri oversaw the publication of the novelist’s letters, stories, and unfinished novel. The Washington Post closed its standalone book review, and the
For Sale: Ernest Hemingway’s childhood home. Amazon has pulled more than four thousand e-books from its digitial shelves after publishers refused to let the company sell them more cheaply. J.K. Rowling is breaking into the world of adult fiction. The Harry Potter author announced this week that after a five-year break, she’s signed a deal with Little, Brown to publish her next book, which will be targeted for an older audience. The book’s title and pub date have not been released. Writer Will Self has been named a Professor of Contemporary Thought at London’s Brunel University. Self will be
Barney Rosset Legendary publisher Barney Rosset passed away yesterday at the age of ninety. From the helm of Grove Press, Rosset was one of the first to publish Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg, David Mamet and Malcolm X, among others, and spent years in court defending his books from charges of obscenity. (This was the the subject of a 2011 documentary about Rosset, Obscene). He also published the literary magazine The Evergreen Review, which still exists online. Here’s a Paris Review interview with Rosset, and a 2008 profile of him by Louisa Thomas. Why was Kanye West thanked
Michael Lewis Cormac McCarthy is such a fan of Lawrence Krauss’s biography of scientist Richard Feynman that, without being asked, he offered to edit the paperback edition of Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science. But the offer came with some copy-editing stipulations. “To start with,” Krauss says, “he made me promise he could excise all exclamation points and semicolons, both of which he said have no place in literature.” Laura Miller and Maud Newton have teamed up on a new blog, The Chimerist, about “two iPad lovers at the intersection of art, stories, and technology.” Variety reports that
Heidi Julavits Amanda Knox, the 24-year-old Seattle native who spent four years imprisoned in Italy for allegedly killing her British roommate while studying abroad (she was eventually acquitted), has signed a $4 million deal with HarperCollins to write a tell-all about her experience. Heidi Julavits and Catherine Lacey are two of the first contributors to Two Serious Ladies, the new online magazine that alludes to the Jane Bowles classic and “promote[s] writing by women.” George Murray has officially closed Ninjabook, one of the earliest and most-read literary blogs. “With the prayers over, the men hoisted Daif’s coffin over their
Anthony Shadid Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Anthony Shadid died of an asthma attack on Wednesday while on assignment reporting in Syria. Before joining the Times, Shadid was the Middle East correspondent for the AP and Boston Globe. Described by Steve Coll as “the most intrepid, empathetic, fully engaged correspondent working in the Middle East for American audiences,” Shadid was the author of the forthcoming memoir House of Stone. The New York Public Library is back on track to continue with a $1 billion, Norman Foster-led renovation of its Fifth Avenue flagship branch, officials announced this week. To
Cheryl Strayed, a.k.a. Sugar Haute couture inspired by Love in the Time of Cholera? Sure, why not. Honduran designer Carlos Campos’s new collection takes its inspiration from Garcia Marquez’s fifty-year-long love story in rural Columbia, resulting in what the New York Post claims is “clothing as poetic and nuanced as the novel.” After two years of anonymity, The Rumpus’s advice columnist, heretofore known as Sugar, outed herself at a party in San Francisco on Tuesday night. She was revealed to be Portland-based writer Cheryl Strayed, author of the forthcoming memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Coast
One of Robert Montgomery’s poetry billboard in London. A poetry vandal is on the loose in London. The Independent reports that artist Robert Montgomery has been plastering his “very pleasing verse,” which “[screams] out ideas about beauty, consumerism and hypocrisy” on billboards across the city. Readers, let us know if any of these literary pick-up lines worked for you. Rozalia Jovanovic has landed a new gig as the Observer’s culture reporter; Craig Morgan Teicher is the new poetry editor at the Literary Review; and JC Gabel has launched his long-awaited magazine, The Chicagoan. Thanks to a $16 million budget
Introducing Warscapes, a new literary magazine featuring poetry, fiction, and art about war. New York reports that Amy Adams is angling to star in the movie adaptation of An Object of Beauty, Steve Martin’s 2010 novel about a young woman’s ascent through the New York art world. In the hierarchy of literary street cred, bragging about listening to audiobooks ranks somewhere near the bottom. At n+1, Maggie Gram dissects the bias against audiobooks, and the implications of having “a whole set of unrelated and real (if only partially attended) experiences while simultaneously experiencing a book.” Humbert Humbert “was… despite
Adam Wilson Could the “Deep Throat” of the Watergate era remain unnamed today? Probably not. According to the New York Times, the Obama administration “has brought more prosecutions against current or former government officials for providing classified information to the media than every previous administration combined.” Adam Liptak reports on reporters’ ability to protect their sources in the midst of a “high-tech war on leaks.” A Justice Department spokesperson offered this All The President’s Men-era advice: “Don’t be stupid and use e-mail . . . You have to meet a reporter face to face, hand him an envelope and
It took author John D’Agata and fact-checker Jim Fingal five years to comb through D’Agata’s 5,000-word essay about a teenager’s suicide in Las Vegas (published in the Believer), and even more time before the two decided to capitalize on their back-and-forth, carping correspondence—it has just been released as a book, The Lifespan of a Fact. Salon’s Laura Miller writes, “the book itself is a travesty of the fact-checking process,” an “ever-burgeoning pissing match” between the wisecracking checker and the “preening and self-important” author. At the New Yorker’s Book Bench blog, New Yorker checker Hannah Goldfield takes a more sympathetic
Author Michael Cunningham And the winner of the inaugural hatchet-job award is…novelist and critic Adam Mars-Jones who clinched the title with his scathing review of Michael Cunningham’s By Nightfall. Digital Book World puts Random House at the top of its list of “best publishing companies to work for,” but also includes a “sample negative employee review” for each firm surveyed. For example, according to a disgruntled worker at second-place John Wiley Sons, “You get the impression that the company is run by automatons.” The Millions judges UK vs. US books by their covers. Following Felix Salmon’s complaints about the
Kathryn Schulz New York magazine has named author Kathryn Schulz as their new book critic, filling a position that opened more than a year ago when Sam Anderson left for the New York Times Magazine. Schulz is the author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, and, apparently not to any professional detriment, refers to herself as the world’s “leading wrongologist.” Katherine Boo’s highly anticipated and already highly praised account of “life and death in a Mumbai undercity,” Behind the Beautiful Forevers, hits shelves this week. In our Feb/March issue, Jonathan Shainin praised Boo’s first book as
Today marks the re-release of William Gaddis’s classics The Recognitions and J R, published in 1955 and 1975, respectively. Once described by Cynthia Ozick as “the most overlooked important work of the last several literary generations,” The Recognitions was a commercial flop when it first came out, prompting a book (Jack Green’s Fire the Bastards!) bemoaning the novel’s weak critical reception. It was only upon the publication of J R, Gaddis’s novel about an eleven-year-old boy “motivated only by good-natured greed,” that Gaddis came into wider success. Still, despite rapturous reviews and two National Book Awards, Gaddis never found