Anton DiSclafani Mimi Alford was nineteen years old when she started interning at the JFK White House in 1962. Four days into the internship, she went swimming with the president, and later that day, Kennedy “‘took her virginity in Mrs. Kennedy’s room.” This is one of the more lurid anecdotes that emerge from Alford’s tell-all about her relationship with the president, which will officially be released on Wednesday, but details of which have already been leaked by the New York Post after they found an early copy in a Manhattan bookstore. Interspersed between Alford’s more scandalous claims—she says Kennedy
“Sometimes an actor performs a character, but sometimes an actor just performs. With writing, I don’t think it’s performing a character, really, if the character you’re performing is yourself. I don’t see that as playing a role. It’s just appearing in public.” The full transcript of Sheila Heti’s interview with Joan Didion is now online. If the blog network Tumblr were a city, it would have 42 million residents. And cities, of course, need newspapers. To accommodate their growing population, Tumblr is creating a “news site for the things that happen in the Tumblrverse,” and has already hired two
The Reader author Bernard Schlink According to the New York Daily News, GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich has written dozens of Amazon user reviews over the past eight years—enough to earn a “Top Reviewer” rating. And what do the reviews teach us about his tastes? “For one, he really hates the Clintons,” the Daily News says. “He loves a good mystery. He’s fascinated with World War II, as well as the Civil War, with a special appreciation for the ‘automatic aggressiveness’ of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.” German author Bernard Schlink is taking the Weinstein Company to court for
Jonathan Galassi Barnes Noble has refused to stock titles from Amazon’s publishing imprint. According to a statement from BN, the move “is based on Amazon’s continued push for exclusivity with publishers, agents and the authors they represent,” which the bookstore claims prevents them from “offering certain e-books to our customers.” However, Barnes Noble’s website will continue to sell books published by Amazon. The Center for the Art of Translation has posted a video of a Lydia Davis lecture on her translation of Madame Bovary, where she explains how she used Nabokov’s marginalia from one of his copies of the
Teju Cole At the Paris Review Daily, Avi Steinberg considers the relationship between libraries and pornography, and how the library, “once a hothouse of Eros and a laboratory of realism, has become a burial site.” Open City author Teju Cole has been appointed the distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Bard College. NYRB Classic’s blog has posted “Good Morning, Giantess!,” the first story from Robert Walser’s new collection, Berlin Stories. Investigative journalism organization ProPublica presents its new (and very timely) Tumblr: “Officials Say the Darndest Things.” What’s the difference between literary and genre fiction? (Aside from success on the New York Times
Russian president and man of letters, Vladimir Putin. In a rambling essay published in Russia Free Newspaper, Russian President Vladimir Putin offers a solution for edifying “the dominance of Russian culture” once and for all: an official literary canon. “Let us take a survey of our most influential cultural figures,” suggests Putin, “and |Each self-respecting student was required to read 100 books from a specially compiled list of the greatest books of the Western world.|compile a 100-book canon| that every Russian school leaver will be required to read.” What will happen when physical Barnes Noble bookstores and their hard-copy
Edmund White, photo by Fladeboe for Vice. Do book bloggers matter? Reed Exhibitions thinks so—they’ve just bought the two year-old Book Blogger Convention as a supplement to BookExpo America (BEA). Children’s author Maurice Sendak had some very adult things to say about e-books during his loopy appearance on the Colbert Report. Until he began to work for Amazon’s publishing arm, Larry Kirshbaum was a successful literary agent and a big-time industry insider, a BusinessWeek cover story on Amazon’s foray into book publishing reports. Since defecting to the digital world six months ago, Kirshbaum has signed big-name writers like Timothy
F. Scott Fitzgerald Last week, novelist Hari Kunzru was advised to leave the Jaipur Literature Festival after he read excerpts of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, which remains banned in India. (Rushdie, also present, received death threats.) On Twitter, Kunzru argues that he did nothing wrong: “More Indian legal experts confirm that we broke no law by reading from The Satanic Verses.” Everyone’s talking about Newt Gingrich’s personal life and political record, but what about his books? In addition to a series of novels about WWII, Gingrich wrote a revisionist take on the Civil War—in which the South
Jonathan Safran Foer has joined the likes of Sam Lipsyte and George Pelecanos. That’s right, he’s writing for HBO. His new show will star Ben Stiller. After putting out her debut, a plague novel titled Last Last Chance with FSG, Fiona Maazel has sold her second novel to Graywolf Press. Described as a “sweeping commentary on loneliness in America,” Maazel’s new book, Woke Up Lonely, features “a cult leader, his ex-wife, and the four people he accidentally takes hostage.” It’s scheduled to come out in Spring 2013. In the meantime, you can read her review of Ben Marcus’s The
New Rumpus contributor Marie Calloway. Gearing up for President Obama’s State of the Union address, the website RealClearBooks is posting daily “state of” reports. Kicking things off is “The state of American Books,” by Bookforum’s Chris Lehmann. Was the threat that prevented Salman Rushdie from attending last weekend’s Jaipur Literary Festival real, or was it fabricated by Indian police? That’s the question overshadowing the scandal, which drove several authors home early out of concern for their safety after they read from Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses, which remains banned in India. Rushdie says he was threatened by “paid assassins”
Sara Marcus reads from Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans at the inaugural event for online magazine Triple Canopy’s new Brooklyn space. Congratulations to Triple Canopy for inaugurating their new space at 155 Freeman Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, with a 48 hour plus reading of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans. The announcements for the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award finalists were made on Saturday. Topping the list for fiction are Jeffrey Eugenides for The Marriage Plot (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and Alan Hollinghurst for The Stranger’s Child (Knopf); and for nonfiction, Adam Hochschild’s To End All Wars:
One of Sera Hur’s Murakami/Sartorialist mashups Want to glimpse inside what is soon to become the world’s most expensive book? The Guardian runs a slideshow of images from John James Audobon’s The Birds of America, a book of ornithological illustrations that goes on auction at Sotheby’s tomorrow. Don’t go into it for the money: According to a New York Times Economix blog breakdown, newspaper writers and editors have a one in 62 chance of breaking into the one percent. What is the role of criticism today? Hear Elif Batuman, Rivka Galchen, Mark Athitakis, Eric Banks, and our very own
The Huffington Post names Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s wife as the new editor of newly inaugurated Huffington Post France; meanwhile, Forbes reports that the site is preparing to launch a 24-hour online video news site. Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation of On the Road—starring Viggo Mortensen, Amy Adams, Steve Buscemi, and Kirsten Dunst, among other newcomers—could hit French theaters by the end of May. Virginia retailers are not happy about legislation allowing Amazon to skip paying state sales taxes—in spite of the company’s “physical presence” in the state. Mein Kampf returns to German bookstores. Cormac McCarthy has turned in his first screenplay.
Etgar Keret Featuring Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis: The Guardian releases an e-book on jazz. The Mitt Romney word cloud: “smooth, smart, slick; detached, disciplined, dogged; pragmatic, protean, phony; careful, cautious, calculating.” Michiko Kakutani reviews The Real Romney, a bio of the likely GOP nominee by Boston Globe reporters Michael Kranish and Scott Helman. On the fiction front, at FSG’s Works in Progress site, Gary Shteyngart Reads Etgar Keret’s “What, of This Goldfish, Would You Wish?” and The Telegraph runs Lydia Davis’s newest story, “The Landing.” Conde Nast has signed up to take on 133,000 additional square feet of
Art for a Mexican horror magazine. Wikipedia will be shut down on Wednesday, January 18, in protest against SOPA, anti-piracy legislation that’s currently under debate in Congress. “#Outsourced2India Namaste, everyone! This is the Real Gary Shteyngart from NYC, USA!”—Gary Shteyngart outsources his Tweets. The Obama campaign and administration have collected tens of thousands of Americans’ “mini-memoirs” over the past several years. Can they be used to more accurately target voters? Bookstore sales fell 8.6 percent in November—the steepest decline all year. Here’s the first part of Sheila Heti’s Believer interview with Joan Didion. Will twenty-eight-year-old Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes
Still from Stephen Elliot’s Cherry How Ben Lerner’s knockout debut Leaving the Atocha station has gotten its publisher, Minnesota’s Coffee House Press some long-overdue attention. Read Deb Olin Unferth’s review of the novel from our Fall issue. Cherry, the first feature film by novelist and Rumpus editor Stephen Elliott, will debut at the Berlin International Film Festival next month. The movie stars Heather Graham, Dev Patel, and (naturally) James Franco. Zadie Smith inaugurates Guernica’s Writers Bloc series with a talk on global education. Reporters can’t talk to citizens without special permission, and the bureau chief will remain in Seoul,
Memoirist Lil Wayne Under a promotion with Harper Collins, British kids will get books instead of toys with their Happy Meals for the next four weeks. The end of an era, as announced on Twitter: “This is the final post from @Borders. We hope you’ll follow @BNBuzz for reading recommendations, exclusive author content, deals more.” And yes, @BNBuzz is Barnes and Noble. Mary Karr’s elegy for Christopher Hitchens (who she only met twice). The trailer for the new Wes Anderson movie is now online. It’s called Moonrise Kingdom, and we have to agree with Slate’s accessment: with it’s twee
Caitlin Flanagan Amazon is going into business with “America’s favorite librarian” Nancy Peal by launching a Book Lust Rediscoveries line dedicated to bringing back her favorite out-of-print books. Meanwhile, indie bookstores are battling Amazon by going into publishing, and Salon’s Laura Miller resolves to give up her Amazon habit in 2012. Rumor has it that Apple’s January 19th press event (which will be held at the Guggenheim) is going to be about about the future of e-books, and specifically, “textbooks. Ebooks. E-textbooks.” Evan Hughes explains why James Franco’s Hart Crane biopic is boring—in spite of Crane’s melodramatic life. The