Tonight at 192 Books, Frederic Tuten will read from his new book Self-Portrait: Fictions. Recently, Bookforum’s Peter Trachtenberg caught up with Tuten to ask him about cinema, his friendship with Roy Lichtenstein, and his “painterly prose.” Donald Rumsfeld’s memoir, Known and Unknown, will be released on January 25. The book has been embargoed, so we won’t be able to read Rummy’s rhetorical twists, revelations about the events leading up to the Iraq War, or recollections of meeting Elvis until the book is in stores. In the meantime, can someone please cook up a book trailer? The Rumpus presents its
Frederic Tuten AN INTERVIEW WITH FREDERIC TUTEN Since dropping out of high school at the age of sixteen with dreams of becoming a painter, Frederic Tuten has lived in Paris; traveled through Mexico and South America; earned a Ph.D. in nineteenth-century American literature; acted in a short film by Alain Resnais; conducted summer writing workshops in Tangiers with Paul Bowles; and written fictions and essays for the artist’s catalogues of Eric Fischl, David Salle, John Baldessari, Jeff Koons, and Roy Lichtenstein. He has also written some of the slyest and most beguiling fiction ever to be described as experimental.
Zadie Smith We know where we’ll be tonight: At the FSG Reading Series, the semi-regular literary event held upstairs at the Russian Samovar. You know the drill: The Samovar will start serving vodka around 6:30. David Bezmozgis and Rahul Bhattacharya will start reading their work at 7. Zadie Smith takes over the “New Books” column at Harper’s. The Paris Review has just launched its redesigned website, which looks as elegant as their new print issue. You’ll want to free up the next several days to peruse their interview archives spanning the 1950s to the present, listen to audio clips, and subscribe to their blog, including an intriguing post by Lydia Davis on translations of Madame Bovary. Barnes and Noble
Tonight at Film Forum, there’s a must-see screening of Stanley Kubrick’s harrowing 1957 film, Paths of Glory, introduced by The Wire’s creator David Simon. Humphrey Cobb’s 1935 novel, on which the film was based, was recently reissued by Penguin classics with a new introduction by Simon, who will sign copies of the book after the film. Simon has cited the movie as a key influence on his work, saying, “If anyone wants to look at Paths of Glory and think it doesn’t speak to the essential triumph of institutions over individuals and doesn’t speak to the fundamental inhumanity of the 20th century and beyond, then they weren’t watching the same
Steve Almond It’s official: Oprah Winfrey has chosen Jonathan Franzen’s new novel for her book club. Here’s a trailer for Chris Lehmann’s Rich People Things, which hilariously uses a scene from Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (watch for the cameo from Nico). Steve Almond takes writerly self-humiliation to glorious heights in a column for The Rumpus, in which he lampoons poems he wrote in his youth. Sample line: “The geese yank his pants with cheddar beaks.” Futurebook offers a crash course on how to use—and not use—Twitter to promote books. The watchdog group Media Matters has examined how The Wall
Elif Batuman It has been almost nine years since Jonathan Franzen hemmed and hawed about Oprah Winfrey’s selection of his novel The Corrections for her book club, but is that long enough for hurt feelings to heal? According to rumors, it is. Melville House publisher Dennis Johnson has reported that Oprah is going to make Franzen’s Freedom her latest pick on Friday. Johnson has also posted a photo that seems to prove him right. That Oprah sticker might still make Franzen fairly itch with ambivalence, but he’ll be scratching his all the way to the bank. Meanwhile, the Franzenfreude will surely increase, and with
Tonight at Brooklyn’s 177 Livingston, Triple Canopy and Cabinet magazine are hosting “A Hearing on the Activities of the International Necronautical Society,” where editors and audience members (as well as novelist Joshua Cohen and critic Christian Lorentzen) will debrief INS founder Tom McCarthy and Chief Philospher Simon Critchley on recent findings. What strides has the INS made toward their goal to “map, enter, colonise and, eventually, inhabit” death? McCarthy’s new novel, C, is his most emphatic answer to the question yet. Chuck Klosterman’s essays are now available for the iTunes-like price of 99 cents each, which seems about right—Klosterman’s best essays have always had the confectionary appeal of a
Last night, The Rumpus’s “Summer Shakedown” event at Brooklyn’s Death by Audio space (which comedian Michael Showalter described as, if we remember correctly, a “blown-out former dentist’s office,”) was everything we told you it would be and more—but also a little bit less. We saw Neal Pollack read about his adventures in yoga and then do the “alligator” pose onstage. We saw Sara Marcus read from her new history of Riot Grrrl, Girls to the Front, and actually sing some of the passages. We saw Nick Flynn read a chapter from his memoir The Ticking is the Bomb about Rumpus honcho and emcee Stephen Elliott
Sunday’s Brooklyn Book Festival, photo by Carolyn Kellogg. Pictures and video from this weekend’s soggy Brooklyn Book Festival, and critic David L. Ulin on the fest’s “moral mysteries.” At one of the marquee events, John Ashbery chatted with Paul Auster about the poet’s first job in New York, at the Brooklyn Public Library: “I did so miserably at that job and was so unhappy at it—though loving Brooklyn of course. I had to punch a time clock and almost every day it was red because I was staying out late in New York.” Fall book picks from the Daily Beast, the LA Times, and Gawker, who offer this sage
CHRIS LEHMANN CHATS ABOUT ‘RICH PEOPLE THINGS’ Chris Lehmann is a conspicuously over-employed editor and cultural critic. He’s a co-editor of Bookforum, a deputy editor for the Yahoo news blog The Upshot, a columnist for the Awl, a contributing editor for The Baffler, and a guitarist and singer for the band The Charm Offensive. He’s also just penned a book, Rich People Things, which will be published this fall by OR books. We recently caught up with Mr. Lehmann via email to discuss the how his blog column became a book, why he considers himself an economic populist, and what we talk
Hilton Als Tonight, the Rumpus ushers in autumn with a “Summer Shakedown” event. There’s a stellar lineup of authors including Nick Flynn (The Ticking is the Bomb), Sara Marcus (Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution), and Hilton Als (Justin Bond/Jackie Curtis), as well as comedians Michael Showalter and Jessi Klein, performers Elissa Bassist and Corrina Bain, and music by Frankie Rose and the Outs. The new Paris Review is out, and we haven’t been so excited about a literary magazine in ages. It’s the first issue edited by Lorin Stein, and if it’s any indication, he’s
John Ashbery If you’re in New York this weekend, you really must go to the Brooklyn Book Festival on Sunday. There are too many events to list, but here are just a few highlights: Joshua Cohen and Matthew Sharpe will talk about Kafka; poet John Ashbery will discuss his work with Paul Auster; and Bookforum co-editor Albert Mobilio will talk about international noir with Mexican author Paco Ignacio Taibo II, French author Caryl Férey, and New York’s Pete Hamill. Other participating authors include Mary Gaitskill, Colson Whitehead, Russell Banks, and Stephen Elliott. There are also a number of related events on Friday
Lionel Shriver Novelist Lionel Shriver details her experience of how “publishers are complicit in ghettoising not only women writers but women readers into [an] implicitly lesser cultural tier.” Using her own novels as examples, such as the disturbing health care tale, So Much for That, Shriver writes that publishers’ insistence on “trussing up my novels as sweet, girly and soft is like stuffing a rottweiler in a dress.” Former Poet Laureate Billy Collins was recently quoted in the Wall Street Journal saying, “lyrics just don’t hold up without the music . . . I assure [my students] that Jim Morrison is not a poet in
Melissa Febos The shortlist for the 2010 Man Booker Prize has been announced. Sure, we may have entered the age of wireless devices and ADD, but as The Millions points out, big, sprawling novels with lots of characters aren’t dead yet. In fact, “the current profusion of long novels would seem to complicate the picture of the Incredible Shrinking Attention Span.” OR Books, the new independent publisher who does not work with Amazon, has announced that it will publish Douglas Rushkoff’s Program or Be Programmed, in which the novelist and countercultural essayist will attempt to help you swim, not
French novelist Michel Houellebecq’s controversial work has been called racist and sexist (and sometimes brilliant). Now critics are crying “plagiarism,” as the author apparently pasted portions of Wikipedia into his new novel, The Map and the Territory. Houellebecq has responded to the charge with his usual sangfroid: “When you use a big word like ‘plagiarism,’ even if the accusation is ridiculous, something (of the accusation) will always remain. . . . And if people really think that, then they haven’t the first notion of what literature is.” At the New Republic G. W. Bowersock remembers the great classicist Bernard Knox, who passed away last month. Tonight,
Simenon Henry James, Raymond Chandler, Thomas Pynchon, J. K. Rowling, Franz Kafka: As a new anthology shows, no writer is too sacred for parody. Eric Ormsby considers highlights in the history of literary ridicule. If you’re looking for an exra-bleak holiday-weekend book, try Simenon’s spiky psychological thriller Red Lights (1955), which opens on the Friday evening before Labor Day, as New Yorker Steve Hogan leaves his Madison Avenue office to meet his wife. They are about to drive to Maine, but first, Steve needs a drink. Once they’re on the road, he pulls over at a bar, where he
W.G. Sebald In a letter to shareholders filed with the S.E.C., Barnes and Noble’s board of directors write that they believe Los Angeles-based investor Ronald Burkle has “a self-serving agenda to seize control of Barnes and Noble,” and outline actions that the shareholders can take to thwart the coup. They write: “Burkle has provided no strategic vision and offered no plan for the Company’s future. Instead, he continues to take conflicting positions, hoping shareholders will be taken in. We think only one conclusion is clear—you cannot believe what Burkle says, and you certainly do not want him in a position to control your
From Take Ivy, photo by Teruyoshi Hayashida. The Guardian’s Books blog has begun its “Not the Booker Prize” competition, where you can nominate a book to win England’s second most coveted literary award. Read the wonderfully wry terms and conditions (all twelve of them) before you vote, but think twice before nominating yourself: 2009’s winner, Rana Dasgupta, found his triumph to be “very depressing.” Random House reports that it saw a boost in profits in the first half of 2010. Thanks, Stieg Larsson! As students make their way back to college, powerHouse Books is publishing a reprint of the 1965 cult classic Take Ivy, a
On July 30, Kevin Morrissey, the managing editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, took his own life. Following that, questions were raised about how the award-winning literary magazine, which is affiliated with the University of Virginia, has been run under editor Ted Genoways. Most have questioned how the magazine spent its money, and some have debated whether Genoways was a “bully” in the workplace. But no one predicted that the small-print-run journal would cancel its winter issue and close its offices—or that it would become national news. That this is happening a month after Morrissey’s death suggests that the journal’s problems—financial and/or interpersonal—are still