Thomas Beller Philip Roth says he no longer reads any fiction at all. Why? “I wised up,” he reports. Thomas Beller—the author, Open City editor, and mastermind behind the website of urban writing Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood—has written an entertaining article about following a Google Street View car in New Orleans. The Paris Review website has a post about Tom Bean and Luke Poling’s feature documentary, Plimpton!, which details the rich life of editor, writer, fireworks enthusiast, bon vivant, and sometime baseball player George Plimpton (he also sparred with boxing legends Archie Moore and Sugar Ray Robinson, among other adventures).
Deborah Eisenberg The New York Review of Books has published a new story by master short fiction writer Deborah Eisenberg. In the story, a young boy named Adam looks through his family’s photo album and finds an exciting revelation. This weekend’s New York Times Magazine story by Jose Vargas, in which he confesses to falsifying documents to illegally work as a US journalist for years, has been met with sharply conflicting reactions in the media world. Elizabeth Bishop refused to be a token woman in all-male poetry anthologies, and didn’t want to be in all-female collections, either, writing: “Undoubtedly
Tao Lin Last month, the New York Times gave Jon-Jon Goulian the triple-crown treatment, devoting three articles to the literary-party mainstay whose memoir, The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt, was set to make him one of “the season’s publishing darlings.” But according to the Awl and the New York Post’s Page Six, Goulian’s book, for which Random House paid a reported $700,000 advance, has sold only 957 copies in the first month. NPR’s Fresh Air remembers historian Tony Judt. Christopher Frizzelle, editor of the alt-weekly The Seattle Stranger, claims that novelist Tao Lin and his publisher, Melville House’s
Siddhartha Deb A hoax website claims that Slavov Zizek and Lady Gaga are close friends, and the New York Post falls for it. In February, Caravan Magazine published an excerpt from Siddhartha Deb’s forthcoming book about contemporary India, The Beautiful and the Damned, published by Penguin in India. The excerpt, “Sweet Smell of Success: How Arindam Chaudhuri Made a Fortune Off the Aspirations—and Insecurities—of India’s Middle Classes,” is a critical take on Arindam Chaudhuri and the business approach of Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM). Now, the IIPM is suing Caravan, its proprietor the Delhi Press, Deb, Penguin
2011 Roger Shattuck Prize winners Lila Azam Zanganeh and Marco Roth. In an article about what the editors and staff of n+1 are reading this summer (Houellebecq, Echols, Maupin, Woolf, and more), the journal’s co-founder Marco Roth writes of experiencing a Proustian epiphany in France: Perhaps it was a sign that he would be awarded the 2011 Roger Shattuck Prize (along with Lila Azam Zanganeh) from The Center for Fiction, an honor named after one of Proust’s most astute critics. They’ll be celebrating the prize tonight at The Center, but we assure you that critic Dale Peck won’t be
Paula Bomer Soho Press has announced that it will publish Paula Bomer’s debut novel, Nine Months, in 2012. We’re still reeling from Bomer’s brilliant and savage story collection, Baby, which Minna Proctor described in this winter’s Bookforum as “punk rock for the roundly domesticated.” The British Library and Google are digitizing more than 250,000 books, spanning the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Coffee House Press’s founder and publisher, Allan Kornblum, is retiring from the imprint he founded in 1973, with Associate publisher Chris Fischbach taking over the top position [via Publishers Lunch]. Could a mother get away with writing a
On the Road, the app. What kind of book makes for good e-reading? Two of the most popular iPad book apps offer examples of what the fledgling art of the e-book could become. TS Eliot’s The Wasteland has a wealth of features annotating the poem, offering curious readers (or puzzled students) new insights into the allusive text. The digital version of Jack Keroauc’s On the Road is jazzed-up with audio recordings, notes detailing his route, biographies of the real people his characters were based on, and a collection of documents from the Viking archive. The Road iPad app isn’t
Geoff Dyer “My only concern is with the future of long-form prose writing and how people want it and how we’re going to connect the reader to the book—whether they want it electronically or in print.” Ethan Nosowsky, the talented Graywolf Press editor who helped usher Geoff Dyer’s latest essay collection, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition into print, reflects on publishing’s next step. Bizarre lunch triangle: You can now bid on the opportunity to dine out with Slavoj Zizek and Julian Assange. What’s the story behind the shocking novel Histoire d’O? The OED gets an update: New words
Last night, Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz hosted a “mingle” at Brooklyn Borough Hall in honor of the upcoming Brooklyn Book Festival, which will take place on September 18. Participants will include Kurt Andersen, Brooke Gladstone, John Hodgman, Phillip Lopate, Sigrid Nunez, Christian Parenti, Adrian Tomine, Touré, Dorothy Allison, Russell Banks,Nuruddin Farah, Jonathan Safran Foer, Diana Gabaldon, Amitav Ghosh, Jessica Hagedorn, Pete Hamill, A.M. Homes, Nicole Krauss, Jhumpa Lahiri, Terry McMillan, Larry McMurtry, Walter Mosley, Joyce Carol Oates, Téa Obreht, Karen Russell, John Sayles, Colson Whitehead, Mary Jo Bang, Timothy Donnelly, and others. The festival will also host a panel
Clancy Martin Hey kids, it’s Bloomsday. You can celebrate with other people in New York. Or you can celebrate in the privacy of your own home…oh yes yes yes. At Salon, Andrew O’Hehir reviews Andrew Rossi’s new documentary film, Page One: Inside the New York Times. The film follows the New York Times’ tribulations against the changing world of media and O’Hehir concludes: “Rossi’s film makes a compelling case on behalf of the traditional values of journalism.” Page One opens tomorrow in New York City. At the Paris Review Daily, How to Win author and Harper’s contributing editor Clancy
The summer issue of the Paris Review is out today; now available in a digital edition. Highlights include an amazing portfolio of video art curated by Marilyn Minter, new fiction by Jonathan Lethem, part two of Roberto Bolano’s The Third Reich, and interviews with William Gibson and Samuel R. Delany. Also: Beach towels!
Nick Flynn, photo © Matt Valentine. The blog Harriet details a new exhibition at the Tate Britain museum dedicated to the short-lived early twentieth-century art and poetry movement called Vorticism, which included Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound. The museum writes, “The Vorticists forged a distinctive style combining machine-age forms and energetic imagery, embracing modernity and blasting away the staid legacy of the Edwardian past.” Tonight, New York’s Cake Shop will host the last Mixer reading of the season, featuring Nick Flynn, Katie Peterson, Jibade Khalil Huffman, Sandra Lim, and Mal Blum. There’s a free audio book download featuring Samuel
Joseph Brodsky At MobyLives, Nathan Ihara reviews some recent books that ponder boredom as a gateway to enlightenment (or a road to ruin). He discuses The Pale King, of course, as well as the novel The Canal by Lee Rourke, and a recent article by Joseph Epstein in Commentary magazine that covers the new non-fiction titles Boredom: A Lively History by Peter Toohey, and A Philosophy of Boredom by Lars Svendsen. Ihara quotes Foster Wallace’s notably downbeat commencement address from Kenyon college in 2005, and Epstein praises Joseph Brodsky’s similar 1989 Dartmouth speech, in which “Brodsky told the 1,100
Patrick Leigh Fermor Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, the genial author famous for his exploits as a daring British soldier in World War II (he once kidnapped a German general) and for his wanderlust (he walked for a year across Europe in the mid-1930s), died on Friday at the age of ninety-six. Fermor’s reputation as one of the greatest travel writers in English is based on the first two books of an unfinished trilogy detailing his perambulations across the tumultuous pre-war European landscape while a teenager, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, written from memory
Saturday at Dia:Chelsea, Triple Canopy and Printed Matter join forces to celebrate the publication of Gwen Allen’s new book, Artists’ Magazines, with a panel featuring artist Paul Chan, The Serving Library co-founder Angie Keefer, artist Matt Keegan, Specific Object founder David Platzker; moderated by Triple Canopy’s Colby Chamberlain.
George Saunders The New York Review of Books has announced a conference to celebrate the life and work of historian Tony Judt, which is scheduled to take place June 23-25 in Paris. “I hammer it out sentence by sentence and it takes a long time. That’s what the work is, right? To make the reader think it is not hard to do.” The Guardian profiles Janet Malcolm. The Iowa Writers’ Workshop—the MFA program that has launched thousands of careers—turns seventy-five. Google has a new feature that makes it easier to track down some authors’ online work [via the Book
Matt Taibbi Polemical journalist Matt Taibbi responds to Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin’s “elaborate defense” of Lloyd C. Blankfein, Goldman Sachs’s chief executive. The em dashes blog lists a handful of People Magazine’s highbrow literary moments, which included profiles of Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, and Christopher Isherwood. According to an article at the Business Insider, it is time for those who scoffed at the New York Times’s online-subscription plan to “eat crow.” At Salon, Tracy Clark-Flory writes about Erica Jong’s anthology Sugar in My Bowl, in which women authors such as Ariel Levy, Meghan O’Rourke, and Daphne Merkin write
Elizabeth Spiers The Observer’s redesign of its print edition and website debuts today. Editor-in-chief Elizabeth Spiers told Yahoo News: “The new design does little to distinguish between long form features that appear in the paper and long-form web exclusives, which we’ll be doing far more of. . . . [But] the biggest change will be an emphasis on breaking news and smaller scoops throughout the day.” Open Letter Books is launching a new e-book series. James Franco should savor this moment: His appearance in the book trailer for the novel Super Sad True Love Story won out over Jay-Z’s
Jeffrey Eugenides Jeffrey Eugenides talks about “Asleep in the Lord,” a story from his forthcoming, highly anticipated novel The Marriage Plot, which he says is “the most autobiographical thing I’ve ever written.” HarperCollins’s imprint Ecco has bought the rights to Philipp Meyer’s new novel, The Son, a multi-generational epic set in Texas, after a “heated auction.” Meyer, recently named one of the New Yorker’s 20 Under 40, published his previous book, American Rust (2009), with Spiegel Grau, an imprint of Random House. You’ve read the tweets, you’ve seen the book trailer, now it’s time to kick back with the