Denis Dutton The third-generation Kindle has become Amazon.com’s bestselling product of all time, edging out the humble print version of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos is touting the Kindle as the ultimate reading machine, saying of competitors such as the iPad: “Customers report using their LCD tablets for games, movies and web browsing, and their Kindles for reading sessions.” Christopher Hitchens denounces his old nemesis Henry Kissinger (and his apologists) in Hitchens’s new column for Slate, “Mr. Kissinger, Have You No Shame?” 2011 will mark the one-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of the start of
Julian Assange New details of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s book deal have surfaced: The pact is reportedly worth 1.5 million dollars (with the majority of the fee being paid by his American publisher, Knopf, which is allegedly kicking in $800,000). However, it isn’t a tome that Assange relishes writing. As he insists: “I don’t want to write this book, but I have to.” Charles Baxter says the “most common mistake new writers make” is “vanity:” “They don’t realize that what has been blazing in their minds does not necessarily make it to the page.” Did you think the holidays
Kevin Morrissey The Virginia Quarterly Review has just published its Fall 2010 issue, closing a painful chapter in the magazine’s history. The issue is dedicated to managing editor Kevin Morrissey, who committed suicide on July 30th. A subsequent investigation by the University of Virginia cleared editor Ted Genoways of allegations of workplace bullying, though it became clear that the office had become unpleasant and unduly stressful, with the audit recommending “appropriate corrective action should be taken with regards to [Genoways].” The VQR’s remembrance of Morrissey notes his key role in the magazine’s recent success: “The quality of the magazine
Alain de Botton In the late 1990s, Saddam Hussein hired a calligrapher to write out the entire Qur’an in Hussein’s blood as a proof of his piety (it took two years, and more than fifty pints of blood extracted by a nurse). Now, authorities in Iraq are wondering what they’re supposed to do with the thing. News that Julian Assange is publishing a memoir with Knopf in 2011 has been leaked. For The Awl’s “Best Women Writers that You’ve Maybe Never Read” series, Emily Gould writes about British fiction writer Barbara Comyn, finding that after reading her work “contemporary
Francine Prose There’s been a flood of year-end best books lists lately, and we don’t blame you if you’ve stopped paying attention (especially since they mostly feature the same few books). However, there is one more list that may come in handy as you prepare for the holidays: 2010’s Best Nonfiction For Winning Family Arguments. On Sunday, Housing Works Bookstore cafe hosted a heartwarming three-hour marathon reading of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, featuring thirty authors including Mary Gaitskill (“I think people who think [Dickens is] corny just can’t read”), Francine Prose (“Here are all these people who could
Amy Hempel From the Vice fiction issue, an interview with Amy Hempel: “I never liked the term ‘minimalism.’ I prefer Raymond Carver’s term. He called Mary Robison and myself ‘precisionists.’ And that’s what he was doing too, of course.” It has been only a few days since Google announced their Books NGram Viewer, a tool that allows you to graph word usage over the years, drawn from millions of digitized books, and there’s already been a bit of NGram fever. Some of the most interesting inquiries have been posed by Slate’s Tom Scocca, who’s discovered when television became more
Sheila Heti, photo from apostrophecast.com The Observer investigates the curious lack of stateside interest in Toronto author Sheila Heti’s second novel, How Should a Person Be? (recently excerpted in n+1’s new issue, and only available from the Canadian indie-publisher House of Anansi Press.) n+1 co-editor Mark Greif wonders if the sex scenes in the novel are too frank, and adds: “If I had a publishing house, the first thing I would do is publish How Should a Person Be? . . . If a book like this, that is so visibly of our moment, can’t be published in America,
Melissa Franklin The New York Times has published a short, vaguely squeamish profile of Jaimy Gordon, whose novel Lord of Misrule was the underdog winner of a 2010 National Book Award. “Ms. Gordon, who has a graduate degree in writing from Brown but also spent time working at a racetrack and briefly lived with an ex-convict who set fire to their apartment, has never been very conventional.” Novelist Rick Moody—who we believe is the author of the best outer-space sex scene ever—and physicist Melissa Franklin recently participated in the Rubin Museum’s “Talk About Nothing” series, discussing Samuel Beckett (and
Deb Olin Unferth The new Vice fiction issue is out now, featuring new stories by Sam McPheeters, Deb Olin Unferth, and the late Terry Southern, plus interviews with graphic novelist Charles Burns, fiction writers Amy Hempel and Sam Lypsite, as well as many other literary treats. The Awl (which currently has a good story in which five authors talk about their Book Editors) will start paying its writers in January. A profile of Rumpus Editor and Adderall Diaries author Stephen Elliott shares his tips on self-promotion. Today at 3pm Caleb Crain will be live chatting on the New Yorker
George Saunders The incomparable George Saunders, the poet laureate of theme parks, has a new short story, “Escape from Spiderhead,” and an interview on the New Yorker’s website. The New York Times reports that The Atlantic is set to make a profit this year for the first time in at least a decade—how did they pull it off? The president of the Atlantic Media Company, Justin B. Smith, explains: “We imagined ourselves as a venture-capital-backed start-up in Silicon Valley whose mission was to attack and disrupt The Atlantic.” (Via Biblioklept) Most writers will tell you that they don’t read
Jonathan Franzen and family, circa 1975. From the Paris Review. If you’ve ever registered on Gawker or one of its sister sites, you may have had your username, email, and password stolen. Gawker assures users that the irony has not been lost on them. The Onion’s AV club has apologized for running a review written by an author who clearly didn’t bother to read the book. Tariq Ali writes that the “neo-con” Liu Xiaobo shouldn’t have received the Nobel Peace prize this year because Liu has supported the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and Korea. The Daily Beast has
Steve Martin frustrated the crowd at the 92nd Street Y earlier this month by disuccsing his new novel, An Object of Beauty, at the expense of what the audience wanted to hear about—his wild and crazy days in show business. He had a considerably better time at a recent appearance on The Colbert Report, a tour-de-force of performance art and comedy featuring artists Frank Stella, Shepard Fairey, and Andres Serrano.
Laura Albert, photo by Marissa Roth for The New York Times. Laura Albert, the author who made her big splash by posing as a former teen drug-addict and prostitute-tuned-writer named J. T. Leroy, is suing her publisher, Bloomsbury, for blowing “a golden opportunity to promote her work following a 2007 fraud trial.” Though Albert is not known for her honesty, she is apparently very meticulous: She’s asking for $131,573.60. Graywolf Press will publish a bilingual edition of poetry by 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, who is currently serving a prison sentence in China for “inciting subversion of
The Nobel Peace Prize ceremony will take place tomorrow (you can watch a live webcast here), but the honoree—Chinese activist and author Liu Xiabo—remains in prison. A group of protesters have delivered an open letter to the Chinese embassy in Oslo calling for Liu’s release. The letter reads, in part: “During the two months since the announcement of the prize in early October, the Chinese government has not only held Liu Xiaobo in prison and confined his wife, Liu Xia, to house arrest; it also has sharply escalated its use of tactics like detention, house arrest, mandatory interrogations, and raids
Idra Novey The new issue of The Paris Review will go on sale December 15. It will include an interview with Jonathan Franzen, paintings by Amy Siliman and Tom McGrath, and a “troubling, sexually charged” novella by Peter Nadas. Via Bookslut: The Babyshambles frontman, possible bad influence, and occasionally incarcerated Pete Doherty has been cast for a French film about 19th-century author Alfred de Musset. Tireless innovator Seth Godin has launched a new imprint called The Domino Project, a partnership with Amazon, which will, as he describes it, “choose and deliver manifestos that are optimized for the tribe, for
Joanna Neborsky’s illustration from “To Have is to Owe” by David Graeber, from Triple Canopy. Following the unveiling of Google’s e-bookstore on Monday, Amazon announces Kindle for the Web. At Triple Canopy, David Graeber’s essay on debt, “To Have is to Owe,” is ingeniously illustrated by Joanna Neborsky. The result is an intriguing example of innovative online publishing—a reading experience that draws you in like print, with the flash and frisson of the web. The Millions’s Year in Reading series provides one of the best collections of end-of-the-year book lists we’ve seen, with picks from Lynne Tillman, Emma Donoghue,