Carlos Fuentes On Saturday night a crowd of critics and authors gathered at WNYC’s hi-tech Jerome L. Greene Performance space, where the finalists for the 2010 NBCC awards were announced. (Afterwards, the conversations we overheard were mostly jokes about the shock of the novel Freedom making the cut, and compliments on the strength of the overall list.) Critic and editor Parul Sehgal was awarded the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, and Dalkey Archive Press won the Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement. The rest of the winners will be announced on March 10th, following two days of
Jean-Philippe Toussaint The competitors and judges of the 2011 Tournament of Books have been announced. If last year’s competition (see the post-game wrapup) is any indication, this is going to be great. Crain’s New York and Galleycat: Bob Dylan has reportedly signed a six-book deal with Simon Schuster. Andrew Wylie, the artist’s literary agent, was, according to one unnamed editor, seeking an eight-figure offer. Among the six books will be a followup to Dylan’s memoir Chronicles: Volume One. At the Millions, Colin Marshall has written an informative “primer” about the novels of Jean-Philippe Toussaint. “Toussaint said that ‘what really
David Vann Slate’s David Weigel is one of the few journalists who received advance copies of O: A Presidential Novel, the soon-to-be-published roman a clef about Obama’s presidential campaign. Spoiler alert: He prints the book’s final sentences. For those who doubt the great march of modernist progress, consider the trajectory of the novel as witnessed by the past century of iconic fiction: Proust, Nabokov, Kerouac, and, now, SnOOki! All that is solid melts into Jersey: “OMG I’m a New York Times Best Selling Author!!! Thank you so much to my fans, family and everyone who made this possible! LOVE
Tamara Chalabi Tonight at the Barnes and Noble on the Upper East side of Manhattan, Tamara Chalabi discusses her new memoir Late for Tea in the Deer Palace, a chronicle of growing up in Iraq as the daughter of the controversial Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi. Just don’t ask Tamara about her father’s role in cheerleading the US into war, a subject she devotes precious little ink to in her story, as Bookforum reviewer Aram Roston found: “it’s perhaps too much to ask for honest insights from Tamara Chalabi into her father.” Harper’s literary editor Ben Metcalf was a key
Mary Karr And now, more Stieg Larsson news: Eva Gabrielsson says that she often wrote with the late author Larsson, and now plans to finish the fourth, uncompleted novel of his wildly successful Millennium crime series. Ignore publicity, shun crowds, refuse recognition, converse only with the classics: Over at the Huffington Post, Anis Shivani offers a new set of rules for writers. It sounds like a gimmick, but he’s serious and sometimes even convincing. “Never for a moment should you think of yourself as successful. You are always a failure, and the better you write, the more you fail,
Jonathan Lethem Wikipedia turns ten years old this weekend, and The Atlantic has assembled a line-up of “all star thinkers” including Jonathan Lethem, Clay Shirky, and the guy who started Craigslist, Craig Newmark (among others), to share their capital T thoughts about the open-source encyclopedia. There’s a lot to digest in the various pieces, but we especially like Lethem’s take: “The generation of an infinite number of bogusly ‘objective’ sentences in an English of agonizing patchwork mediocrity is no cause for celebration, even if it eventually amounts to a Borgesian paraphrase of our entire universe.” A newly discovered Dashiell
The Cerulean Warbler: Celebrity Bird From n+1’s recent self-improvement issue, a long and enlightening essay on a dirty word, elitism: “American political, aesthetic, and intellectual experience can only be glimpsed through a thickening fog of culture war. And the fog, very often, has swirled around a single disreputable term.” OR Books announces its entrant into a quickly growing literary genre, WikiLeaks lit, with the publication of Micah L. Silfry’s WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency. Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom may give a boost to Katie Fallon’s new book about the cerulean warbler, the rare and beautiful blue songbird emblazoned
Edwidge Danticat A new draft of a Federico Garcia Lorca poem has been found at the Library of Congress. Today marks the anniversary of last year’s earthquake in Haiti, and Edwidge Danticat’s moving essay “A Year and A Day” in this week’s New Yorker reminds us that the country is still recovering. Danticat has also edited the gripping fiction anthology “Haiti Noir,” just published by Akashic books, and as publisher Johnny Temple points out, “‘Haiti Noir’ is totally unapologetic . . . It’s bold, it’s stylized. It’s not like, ‘Give these writers a break.’ They can stand on their
Eric Alterman John Nolan, an editor of the Rochester Times and author of the paper’s police log, has started inserting puns, humor, and poetry into the blotter’s formerly humdrum record of crimes and misdemeanors: “At Halloween, upon a street, where youngsters go for Trick-or-Treat, a worried parent calls the cops. His kid has been handed Hall’s cough drops . . . Police check out this plot of terror, and find it was a simple error.” Sick of hearing about David Foster Wallace yet? A cottage industry of work on Wallace is beginning to bloom in academia, as the Chronicle
Martin Amis “’Congrats’ to @tao_lin and @meganboyle on their ‘elopement.’ News gave me a ‘smiling’ facial expression, ‘restored’ my ‘faith in love.’” Christian Lorentzen writes Tao Lin’s wedding announcement—in the style of Tao Lin. Martin Amis is moving to New York, and his new novel is said to be a “withering” critique of the UK. Still, the author feels “incurably English.” “Today, no poet could outwit any reader who has an Internet connection.” Adam Kirsch argues that Google has made literary allusions more “democratic and more generous” than they were in the age of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.”
Michael Chabon MobyLives excerpts a letter in which New York Magazine editor Adam Moss dwells on the importance of finding “wonderful new voices who will keep the magazine fresh and moving forward.” Which prompts MobyLives to ask a good question: “Who are the most exciting young critics currently writing?” Your new book is coming out soon: Design a cool book cover, self-publish, and print-on-demand. Easy! Now you just need to figure out a way to sell them. Obama is to be the subject of a new work of fiction titled O: A Presidential Novel, due in stores on January
Jami Attenberg According to an entertaining article in the New York Observer, it’s a good time to find a job as a writer or an editor—if you’re “talented,” that is! But don’t expect to be lavishly wined and dined: Today’s biggest hires happen over a beer or a cup of coffee. When is author Shalom Auslander’s editor going to get around to reading his manuscript? Mark Twain scholar Alan Gribben is distressed that Huckleberry Finn has been pushed out of schools because of the book’s use of a racial epithet. So, he’s creating a new edition of the novel
Chad Post Open Letter publisher Chad Post engages in “wild speculation” over the inflated prices of two books that rival publisher (and Post’s former employer) Dalkey Archive Press is releasing in 2011. Post writes: “This switch from a $12.95 to (the unsellable) $34.95 feels like some sort of punishment or retaliation or something. But where is this punishment directed?” Many critics have complained about James Frey’s “fiction factory.” Here’s a taste of its product: A film trailer for a recently published book, I Am Number Four, which Frey co-wrote with a Columbia MFA graduate. The Millions has posted its
Sam Anderson You heard it here first: Next month, McSweeney’s Press will reportedly publish a compact and shocking novel titled Donald, which, though fiction, will feature events based on the crazy life of Donald Rumsfeld. The authors are said to be Eric B. Martin, author of Winners, and Stephen Elliott, the primary force behind The Rumpus, and the author of the amazing memoir The Adderall Diaries (soon to be a movie directed by James Franco). Elliott is also a seasoned political writer, so this novel should be legit. That said, this information was—like many good scoops—gleaned over drinks at
One of Artist and librarian Rachael Morrison’s book-smelling ledgers. Those were the days: GalleyCat rounds up the top ten publishing stories for each month of 2010. We love the smell of books in the morning, as does artist and MoMA librarian Rachael Morrison, who spends her lunch-break sniffing each book in MoMA’s library and cataloging her impressions (such as “armpit,” or “cigar smoke and tea”) in an accounting ledger. So far, she’s chronicled the scent of one hundred and fifty tomes out of the library’s three hundred thousand volumes. (via The Rumpus). Amazon has announced a breakthrough in the
Deborah Baker It seems like only yesterday that we were breathlessly speculating about the first iPad, but apparently it is already time for rumors about the iPad 2, which may be released as early as February 2011. Meanwhile, iPad magazine sales have dropped. Blogger and Brooklyn bookseller Adam Wilson has landed a book deal with Harper Perennial for his debut novel, Flatscreen, which will be published in 2012. Acquiring editor Michael Signorelli explained the deal: “We became aware of Adam through his blogging and his stellar bookselling at BookCourt. Acquiring Adam’s novel is like a last-minute present to myself.
W. G. Sebald In a fascinating literary homage, photographer Rick Poynor visits the town of Terezin in the Czech Republic and returns with an essay about W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, complete with contemporary versions of the photographs that appear in Sebald’s book. At the Village Voice, rock writer Rob Tannenbaum names (and interviews) the best music critic of the year—well, “names” isn’t quite right. The award winner is anonymous; He files brief reviews on Twitter as @Discographies. Though short on words, his evaluations pack an expansive, acidic humor. Novelist Benjamin Percy talks about his intense work ethic, the Iowa