• Jim Romenesko
    February 28, 2012

    Feb 28, 2012 @ 4:00:00 am

    A new issue of n+1 film supplement N1FR is out, featuring Damion Searls on Margin Call, Christine Smallwood on Apichatpong “Joe” Weerasethakul (and on Herzognian caves), among other good things. To boot, the editor’s note begins with an apology: “This second edition of the N1FR, n+1’s film review, is very late,” writes A.S. Hamrah. “Its lateness has nothing to do with n+1 or with any of the contributors, or with our generous sponsor IFC Films. It’s entirely my fault.”

    Minnesota-based Graywolf Press and literary magazine A Public Space are embarking on a new collaborative publishing effort.

    Read more
  • Dmitri Nabokov
    February 27, 2012

    Feb 27, 2012 @ 12:58:00 am

    Algonquin Books hopes to release legendary publisher Barney Rosset’s unfinished autobiography, tentatively titled The Subject Was Left-Handed, by the end of the year.

    Vladimir Nabokov’s son Dmitri Nabokov died in Vevey, Switzerland, last Wednesday at the age of seventy-seven. According to the Times, Dmitri was “a bon vivant, a professional opera singer, a race car driver and a mountain climber.” But he was best known as the executor of his father’s estate. After Vladimir’s death, Dmitri oversaw the publication of the novelist’s letters, stories, and unfinished novel.

    The Washington Post

    Read more
  • For Sale: Ernest Hemingway’s childhood home.
    February 23, 2012

    Feb 24, 2012 @ 1:00:00 am

    Amazon has pulled more than four thousand e-books from its digitial shelves after publishers refused to let the company sell them more cheaply.

    J.K. Rowling is breaking into the world of adult fiction. The Harry Potter author announced this week that after a five-year break, she's signed a deal with Little, Brown to publish her next book, which will be targeted for an older audience. The book's title and pub date have not been released.

    Writer Will Self has been named a Professor of Contemporary Thought at London's Brunel University. Self will be teaching in the arts and social sciences

    Read more
  • Barney Rosset
    February 22, 2012

    Feb 22, 2012 @ 1:15:00 am

    Legendary publisher Barney Rosset passed away yesterday at the age of ninety. From the helm of Grove Press, Rosset was one of the first to publish Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg, David Mamet and Malcolm X, among others, and spent years in court defending his books from charges of obscenity. (This was the the subject of a 2011 documentary about Rosset, Obscene). He also published the literary magazine The Evergreen Review, which still exists online. Here's a Paris Review interview with Rosset, and a 2008 profile of him by Louisa Thomas.

    Why was Kanye West thanked in Patrick French’s

    Read more
  • Michael Lewis
    February 21, 2012

    Feb 21, 2012 @ 4:00:00 am

    Cormac McCarthy is such a fan of Lawrence Krauss’s biography of scientist Richard Feynman that, without being asked, he offered to edit the paperback edition of Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science. But the offer came with some copy-editing stipulations. “To start with,” Krauss says, “he made me promise he could excise all exclamation points and semicolons, both of which he said have no place in literature.”

    Laura Miller and Maud Newton have teamed up on a new blog, The Chimerist, about “two iPad lovers at the intersection of art, stories, and technology.”

    Variety reports that the

    Read more
  • Heidi Julavits
    February 20, 2012

    Feb 20, 2012 @ 4:00:00 am

    Amanda Knox, the 24-year-old Seattle native who spent four years imprisoned in Italy for allegedly killing her British roommate while studying abroad (she was eventually acquitted), has signed a $4 million deal with HarperCollins to write a tell-all about her experience.

    Heidi Julavits and Catherine Lacey are two of the first contributors to Two Serious Ladies, the new online magazine that alludes to the Jane Bowles classic and “promote[s] writing by women.

    George Murray has officially closed Ninjabook, one of the earliest and most-read literary blogs.

    “With the prayers over, the men hoisted

    Read more
  • Anthony Shadid
    February 17, 2012

    Feb 17, 2012 @ 4:00:00 am

    Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Anthony Shadid died of an asthma attack on Wednesday while on assignment reporting in Syria. Before joining the Times, Shadid was the Middle East correspondent for the AP and Boston Globe. Described by Steve Coll as "the most intrepid, empathetic, fully engaged correspondent working in the Middle East for American audiences," Shadid was the author of the forthcoming memoir House of Stone.

    The New York Public Library is back on track to continue with a $1 billion, Norman Foster-led renovation of its Fifth Avenue flagship branch, officials announced

    Read more
  • Cheryl Strayed, a.k.a. Sugar
    February 16, 2012

    Feb 16, 2012 @ 12:26:00 am

    Haute couture inspired by Love in the Time of Cholera? Sure, why not. Honduran designer Carlos Campos’s new collection takes its inspiration from Garcia Marquez’s fifty-year-long love story in rural Columbia, resulting in what the New York Post claims is "clothing as poetic and nuanced as the novel."

    After two years of anonymity, The Rumpus's advice columnist, heretofore known as Sugar, outed herself at a party in San Francisco on Tuesday night. She was revealed to be Portland-based writer Cheryl Strayed, author of the forthcoming memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Coast Trail.

    Read more
  • One of Robert Montgomery's poetry billboard in London.
    February 15, 2012

    Feb 15, 2012 @ 12:14:00 am

    A poetry vandal is on the loose in London. The Independent reports that artist Robert Montgomery has been plastering his “very pleasing verse,” which “[screams] out ideas about beauty, consumerism and hypocrisy” on billboards across the city.

    Readers, let us know if any of these literary pick-up lines worked for you.

    Rozalia Jovanovic has landed a new gig as the Observer’s culture reporter; Craig Morgan Teicher is the new poetry editor at the Literary Review; and JC Gabel has launched his long-awaited magazine, The Chicagoan.

    Thanks to a $16 million budget cut, California libraries are now

    Read more
  • February 14, 2012

    Feb 14, 2012 @ 4:00:00 am

    Introducing Warscapes, a new literary magazine featuring poetry, fiction, and art about war.

    New York reports that Amy Adams is angling to star in the movie adaptation of An Object of Beauty, Steve Martin’s 2010 novel about a young woman’s ascent through the New York art world.

    In the hierarchy of literary street cred, bragging about listening to audiobooks ranks somewhere near the bottom. At n+1, Maggie Gram dissects the bias against audiobooks, and the implications of having “a whole set of unrelated and real (if only partially attended) experiences while simultaneously experiencing a book.”

    Read more
  • Adam Wilson
    February 13, 2012

    Feb 13, 2012 @ 4:00:00 am

    Could the “Deep Throat” of the Watergate era remain unnamed today? Probably not. According to the New York Times, the Obama administration “has brought more prosecutions against current or former government officials for providing classified information to the media than every previous administration combined.” Adam Liptak reports on reporters’ ability to protect their sources in the midst of a “high-tech war on leaks.” A Justice Department spokesperson offered this All The President’s Men-era advice: “Don’t be stupid and use e-mail . . . You have to meet a reporter face to face, hand him an

    Read more
  • February 10, 2012

    Feb 10, 2012 @ 4:00:00 am

    It took author John D’Agata and fact-checker Jim Fingal five years to comb through D’Agata’s 5,000-word essay about a teenager’s suicide in Las Vegas (published in the Believer), and even more time before the two decided to capitalize on their back-and-forth, carping correspondence—it has just been released as a book, The Lifespan of a Fact. Salon’s Laura Miller writes, “the book itself is a travesty of the fact-checking process,” an “ever-burgeoning pissing match” between the wisecracking checker and the “preening and self-important” author. At the New Yorker’s Book Bench blog, New Yorker

    Read more