John Updike’s boyhood home. Huffington Post’s new interactive book club won’t be limited just to HuffPost itself, a spokesman tells the Nieman Lab. In addition to soliciting Twitter and Facebook comments, the club will host Flickr and Instagram pages when it launches on January 3. John Updike’s four-bedroom boyhood home in Shillington, Pennsylvania is for sale on eBay. Despite being a “fixer-upper,” the opening bid was $249,000, and there’s a $499,000 ‘Buy It Now’ option. The Boston Globe’s Ideas section recommends holiday gifts for the linguistically inclined. The Oxford American releases its thirteenth annual music issue, this time with
Mop-topped London Mayor Boris Johnson. Amazon says that Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography was the bestselling book of the year in both print and e-book sales. Thanks to an Etsy seller with a surplus of books and time, it’s now possible to buy “literary action figures” (aka author dolls) this holiday season. London Mayor Boris Johnson—who once wondered aloud why girls love “big, epically long, boring books”—supports the idea of opening book swaps in the city’s seven hundred tube and train stations, but he isn’t optimistic about meeting the proposed deadline of the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in the
Things are heating up in the editor’s mailbox at the New York Review of Books: In response to Rita Dove’s 1,720-word “Letter to the Editor,” a critique of her review of Dove’s The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry, Helen Vendler quips, “I have written the review and I stand by it.” Slate duly revisits a history of dismissive replies. The best? Joan Didion’s reply to a letter critiquing her review of Woody Allen’s Manhattan: “Oh, wow.” Mayor Bloomberg, speaking on John Gambling’s radio show, says of the curtailing of press freedom at Occupy Wall Street: “We didn’t
A pages of Dickens’s Great Expectations Tomorow at Cabinet magazine HQ in Brooklyn, editor Brian Dillon will be writing a novel in twenty-four hours. From noon to six, Dillon’s literary experiment will be open to observation from the public, bringing to mind a stunt performed by Georges Simenon in 1927. Super-critic Kerry Howley is blogging about the primaries for Yahoo! News. In the first installment, she reports on Rick Santorum’s visit to an iconic Iowa City diner. Howley writes, “Well after Santorum departed, the reporters continued their search for non-reporters to interview. Robert ‘Ajax’ Ehl, a young dishwasher [.
Christopher Logue, photo by Eamonn McCabe/The Guardian. Bookforum editor and poet Albert Mobilio joins John Yau and Star Black for a visual arts-inspired reading tonight at 7pm at the Melville House Bookstore in DUMBO, Brooklyn, followed by a discussion with artist Susan Mastrangelo, whose collaboration with Mobilio is currently on display there. The “maverick” political poet and playwright Christopher Logue has died at age 85 in London. The English literati is already paying tribute: Craig Raine calls Logue “one of the liveliest people I’ve ever known,” the Times Literary Supplement recalls the poet’s upbraiding of T. S. Eliot in
David Guterson, photo by Sean Smith. So far we’re enjoying what HTML Giant is calling its Tournament of Bookshit week, a skewed competition that will play out in NCAA-style brackets between literary (and not-so-literary) topics. This year’s topics include “magic realism” vs. “living in Brooklyn,” and “talking shit about the New Yorker while submitting frequently to NYer” vs. “dream sequence w/ talking animals.” And now, for a dissenting view: Margaret Atwood says Twitter inspires people to write better and read more books. David Guterson has won the bad sex in fiction award. Why are long-form profiles from 1995 the
Georges Perec poster in St. Mark’s Books, photo by Brendan Bernhard. Writers Elif Batuman and Aminatta Forna, critics Tim Parks and Christopher Ricks, and novelist Yiyun Li will be deciding who wins the 2013 Man Booker International Prize. If you haven’t been following The Millions’s “Year in Reading” series (which so far has featured Geoff Dyer, Jennifer Egan, Scott Esposito, and John Williams), Benjamin Hale’s list is a good place to start. Aside from going to recently rent-reduced St. Mark’s Bookshop in person, this photo-essay is the next best thing. In its round-up of the best book reviews of
Susan Sontag A copy of the Paris Review signed by Johnathan Franzen, high tea with Jon-Jon Goulian, and a ticket (including plus one) to the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue preview party are three of the offerings up for grabs at the Paris Review auction. Books in the Hood, the only bookstore in the South Bronx, and the only independent bookstore in the Bronx, period, is set to close later this month. Publisher John Wiley is partnering with the Forbes media company to put out a graphic biography of Steve Jobs with a special focus on his relationship to Buddhism—and
Literary scandal-maker Q.R. Markham. In typical cringe-inducing fashion, the New York Times’s Style section profiles online magazine The New Inquiry and its raft of twenty-something editors. With its “breathless descriptions,” “frequent descriptions of clothes,” and “required mention of Ivy League degrees,” Gawker describes the article as “an excellent reminder to never talk to a Style section reporter.” In the past four years, the New York Public Library’s workforce has been slashed by 27 percent, and its acquisitions budget for books, CDs and DVDs has seen a 26 percent reduction. Still, the NYPL is planning a massive renovation of its
Hunter S. Thompson Egypt’s longest-running literary magazine, Adab wa Naqd (Literature and Criticism), may close after twenty-seven years due to financial troubles. Daniel Radcliffe, better known as Harry Potter, may replace Jesse Eisenberg as a young Allen Ginsberg in Kill Your Darlings, a forthcoming film about “poetry, gay stalkers and murder in 1940s New York.” At The Los Angeles Review of Books, Glen David Gold considers the transactional nature of literary friendships: “It’s hard to explain to writing students that there are pods of very friendly, arguably moral authors who treat each other as if the literary life is
Tom McCarthy’s desktop. Frank Miller, the author of numerous Marvel comic books and the director of “Sin City,” recently called participants in the OWS movement “a pack of louts” and “pond scum.” Some were outraged, but Rick Moody says it’s no surprise—Miller’s outburst is part of a long history of cinematic propaganda. Eighteen dioceses of the Catholic Church are putting German publishing giant Weltbild up for sale after the revelation that it was selling “soft porn.” Edan Lepucki gives eight compelling reasons for why she doesn’t want to self-publish. The New York Times has announced its 11th Arts Leisure
The mysteriously successful Kindle Fire. With the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible and the international success of Steig Larsson, the Guardian declares 2011 the “year of the translator,” and postulates that we’re closer than ever before to embarking upon a universal language. Katie Roiphe looks for examples of “how to live”—Sarah Bakewell style—from the syllabi of David Foster Wallace. According to Amazon, Kindle sales have quadrupled this year over last… but since the company won’t release any numbers, there’s no way of knowing how many were sold. In other publications: Cartoonist Daniel Clowes makes (or more precisely,
Tonight Dissent and the Jacobin are hosting a panel on the future of Occupy Wall Street: “On the two-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, the 99 percent poured into the streets for a massive day of protest against glaring inequalities of wealth and political power. Following nationally coordinated police raids on protest camps, occupiers face new choices about the direction of OWS. What next? On Monday, November 28, we will discuss how social movements with diverse tactics, needs, and goals grow and gain power in the face of repression. The conversation will feature Frances Fox Piven, an activist and
Mark Z. Danielewski Ewan McGregor will play the middle son in HBO’s forthcoming adaptation of Johnathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections. In what Moby Lives reads as an “apparent slap at Amazon,” Penguin has annoucned that it will no longer release its new titles through OverDrive, “the major distributor of ebooks to most libraries… including the Kindle Lending Library.” The Paris Review now sells onesies (as in, literary baby apparel). The two-days-before-Thanksgiving hashtag of the moment is #literaryturducken, which mashes up “not one, not two, but three classic works into one, in the spirit of the turkey+duck+chicken creole classic,” Doubleday
A rally at UC Davis The UC Davis English Department has backed a statement calling for the chancellor’s resignation after last week’s pepper spraying and for “a policy that will end the practice of forcibly removing non-violent student, faculty, staff, and community protesters by police on the UC Davis campus.” A new issue of the Paris Review is out, featuring interviews with Jeff Eugenides and Alan Hollinghurst, and fiction by Clarence Lispector, Roberto Bolaño, and Adam Wilson, among other goodies. Despite the presence of Bookforum’s corporate headquarters, New York doesn’t even break the top ten in National Geographic’s list
One of Julian Montague’s recent book cover selections. Europeans are slow to jump on the e-reader bandwagon. Norway’s crime writers consider how their attitudes towards crime fiction have changed in the wake of the Oslo massacre. What would you read in an Occupy Wall Street reading group? We’re taking suggestions on our twitter feed with the hash-tag, #owsbookclub. Tonight at the New York Public Library, Joan Didion talks to author Sloane Crosley about Didion’s latest memoir, Blue Nights. Designer Julian Montague’s book cover a day website should be your new go-to procrastination page. A website called Fiction Circus is
Keith Gessen getting arrested. Readers! Our Dec/Jan issue is now online. Check out the table of contents, then rush out and buy an issue! Jenny Diski does not care about crime writer Lindsay Ashford’s claim that Jane Austen may have died of arsenic poisoning. Jesmyn Ward, Stephen Greenblatt, and Nikky Finney won National Book awards for fiction, non-fiction and poetry, respectively. Samples of their books are available here. What can you learn about a small, turn-of-the-century town from library ledgers? At Slate, John Plotz writes about a surprisingly comprehensive database that tracks the borrowing records of the Muncie Public
Ford’s Theater, in Washington, D.C. The National Book Awards took place last night at Cipriani Wall Street, just a few blocks from one of today’s protests. Despite inaccuracies with names, places, and events (not to mention one big conflict of interest) Bill O’Reilly’s book Killing Lincoln is for sale in the Ford’s Theater Society gift shop. Spotted in the Twitterverse: “So it turns out that Shakespeare’s stage direction ‘Exit, pursued by a bear’ was written for a real polar bear.” Over at the Believer, Claire Hamilton and Jon Cotner, co-author of Ten Walks/Two Talks, have assembled a slide show
An eerily empty Zuccotti Park on Tuesday morning. Did New York City police destroy some of the People’s Library when they raided Zuccotti Park early Tuesday morning? Protesters think so; but the city insists that the 5,554 books (at least some of them) are safely being stored at the 57th Street Sanitation Garage. Meanwhile, writers are planning to convene in the park at 6 p.m. tonight to rebuild the library. Novelist Ben Ehrenreich compiles a Spotify playlist of the songs he listened to while writing his novel Ether. Salman Rushdie gripes on Twitter about Facebook deactivating his account for