Ben Carson In the field of Republican lit this week: George H. W. Bush has decided to weigh in on his son’s presidency: Donald Rumsfeld, he felt, according to his new book, “served the president badly. . . . There’s a lack of humility, a lack of seeing what the other guy thinks. He’s more kick ass and take names, take numbers.” Dick Cheney has responded to the elder Bush’s characterization of him as an “iron-ass” by claiming it as “a mark of pride.” Meanwhile, several journalists have been shouldering the burden of reading the current presidential candidates’ books
Lydia Davis Everyone is enjoying the delicious irony of Amazon’s new show, Good Girls Revolt, being “fundamentally premised on the championing of employees’ rights.” Fear and loathing, meanwhile, greets the judge who recently decided to let Hulk Hogan dig through Gawker’s e-mail, a move that is, in the words of the New York Observer’s editors, “scaring the hell out of lots of publishers.” Veteran editor John Freeman offers a somewhat breathless account (and who can blame him?) of his experience publishing Lydia Davis. In the New York Times, a brief interview with the formidable Roberto Calasso, whose memoir, The
Mathias Énard Mathias Énard, the author, most famously, of Zone, a novel in a single sentence, has won the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary award (its seriousness is heavily underlined by its $10 prize money). Steve Silberman discusses his book on autism, Neurotribes, which just became the first work of popular science to win the Samuel Johnson Prize for nonfiction. And if you’d like to feel drunk with power for once, voting is now open for this year’s Goodreads Choice Awards, “the only major book awards decided by readers.” You can now read what Margaret Atwood and her
Mary Gaitskill Both ways is the only way they want it: After helping put who knows how many others out of business, Amazon open their own physical bookstore. For the New York Times magazine, Parul Sehgal profiles Mary Gaitskill, whose new novel, The Mare, is reviewed in the next issue of Bookforum. In person, Sehgal describes her as “wary in the way of habitually truthful people trying to stay out of trouble. . . . She feels misunderstood, which, of course, she is.” No easy feat to interview a writer who specializes in evoking “the hidden life, the life
Lou Reed ESPN has pulled the plug on its sports, pop-culture, and news website Grantland. This comes about a month after editors Sean Fennessey, Juliet Litman, Mallory Rubin, and Chris Ryan left Grantland to work on an unknown project led by Grantland founder Bill Simmons. Many have mourned the loss of the site. As for ESPN, the company itself did not seem have its heart in Grantland: “We’re getting out of the pop culture business,” a senior ESPN source told CNN. Howard Sounes’s biography of Lou Reed was released in the UK on October 22. Reed was always considered
Raif Badawi Raif Badawi, the Saudi blogger imprisoned for the past few years and soon to be flogged again as part of his sentence, has been awarded the European Union’s Sakharov prize for human rights. This week in conflicts of interest: There seems to be some disagreement as to whether it’s acceptable to assign a piece on tech entrepreneurs, including Airbnb, to a writer whose husband is one of Airbnb’s biggest investors. T magazine’s Deborah Needleman tells New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan she doesn’t regret commissioning Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, though perhaps there ought to have been some disclosure
Marlon James For those who couldn’t bear to watch, CNN names “winners and losers” in last night’s Republican presidential debate. In the age of the internet, your juvenilia often comes back to haunt you. So you’re well placed to sympathize with Truman Capote, whose stories for his high-school newspaper, after languishing for years in the archives of the New York Public Library, are now reappearing for all to see. A bit of glory for writers is always welcome: You may not have known, but yesterday was proclaimed Marlon James Day by both the mayor of Minneapolis and the governor
Alex Pareene 20 percent nicer,’” as Re/Code puts it, they’ve picked one of their old guard, Alex Pareene, former editor of Wonkette and a survivor of First Look Media’s ill-fated Racket. John Cook, Gawker Media’s executive editor, proclaimed his excitement that Pareene would take over in time to make the most of a 2016 presidential race that “promises to be nothing short of a terrifying circus.” Vox and Buzzfeed have seemingly helped embarrass the SXSW festival’s organizers into reinstating and expanding its planned discussions about online harassment (which they’d tried to cancel after a brief burst of targeted online
Junot Díaz Lisa Jardine, “the leading British female public intellectual of our times,” is the subject of an impressive and very moving collaborative obituary that honors her as a scholar, teacher, and friend: She showed “generations of women who came after her that it was both possible to succeed at work and at many other things as well.” The Dominican Consul General has stripped the writer Junot Díaz of his Order of Merit award for speaking out against what the Dominican Republic has been doing to Haitians and those of Haitian descent. PEN’s website has hosted an unusually thoughtful
Germaine Greer Why did Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign recently pay HarperCollins $122,252.62? According to the New Republic, the candidate (whose literary agent, Keith Urbahn, was Donald Rumsfeld’s chief of staff) was probably buying up copies of his new book, A Time for Truth. (The bulk purchases led the Times to leave the book off of its best-seller list.) He’s not the only candidate who is boosting his own sales: Earlier this year Ben Carson spent $150,000 buying up copies of his book A More Perfect Union, the centerpiece of his recent author tour. Harriet Klausner—a former librarian who wrote
Shane Smith Paul West, the novelist and critic (and former Bookforum “First Novels” columnist), has died. “As a stylist,” the New York Times notes in its obituary, he “pulled out most if not all the stops” in books whose protagonists might be astronauts or aliens, Jack the Ripper or von Stauffenberg (who gave his name to the plot against Hitler). “The impulse here,” West wrote in his 1985 vindication of purple prose, “is to make everything larger than life, almost to overrespond, maybe because, habituated to life written down, in both senses, we become inured and have to be
Eileen Myles Who wouldn’t want to eavesdrop on a conversation between Alexander Chee and Eileen Myles? But this one especially seems designed to cheer the rest of us up: “I feel there’s a revolution going on,” Myles says, “like the road saga of the 50s and 60s for boys might be writing poetry for females right now. And I just love how poetry seems to be totally. . . the notebook is open—girls, and girlboys, young people and older people and all kinds of people are writing in it. Something special, mortal, cheap and fun, a new way of
Henry David Thoreau Responding to what he calls Kathryn Schulz’s “devastation of Thoreau’s character, style, and mental health” in her latest New Yorker essay (which is also fun to read: “No feature of the natural landscape is more humble than a pond,” she writes, “but, on the evidence of Thoreau, the quality is not contagious”), Jedediah Purdy mounts a spirited defense of “a genuine American weirdo.” Futuristically enough, we’ll all soon be able to experience New York Times stories through virtual reality. Meanwhile, Twitter has hired a Times editor at large as editorial director of its currently-not-compelling-enough Moments section.
Jay Carney Behold a small parable of journalism and the workplace in the twenty-first century. Amazon’s spokesman (that’s Jay Carney, ex-White House Press Secretary to you) says on Medium that Amazon is much nicer than the New York Times would have you think, and that the Times reporters got one of their most colorful quotes, about Amazonians weeping at their desks, from an untrustworthy, disgruntled former employee who’d been caught perpetrating a fraud. The Times’s executive editor (also on Medium) stands by the story, in detail, and notes that, “Several other people in other divisions also described people crying
Dale Peck The Evergreen Review, the legendary literary publication that is currently being revived by Dale Peck and John Oakes, is throwing a party at Le Poisson Rouge on November 2. The event will be emceed by Peck, and will feature Heather Abel, Calvin Baker, Alex Chee, Mark Doten, and John Keene. There will be “literary outrages, parodies of beloved icons, and a performance/happening.” They are making it clear that this will be no ordinary literary event: “No readings!” The New York Times reports that David Lynch will write, with the help of journalist Kristine McKenna, a memoir-biography hybrid
Jennifer Clement Last night, the Kirkus Prize, one of the most lucrative book awards in the world at $50,000 for each winner, went to Hanya Yanagihara, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Pam Muñoz Ryan. In the New York Times magazine, Jonathan Mahler revisits the strange tale of Osama bin Laden’s killing—”not only a victory for the U.S. military but also for the American storytelling machine”—and the official statements, reporting, and other accounts of it (including Kathryn Bigelow’s 2012 film Zero Dark Thirty, which she rather grandly called “the first rough cut of history”). Mahler interviews Seymour Hersh, whose LRB story challenging
Hanya Yanagihara The shortlist for the National Book Award is out, and some helpful soul has collected free samples of most of the books in question, including the memoirs by Sally Mann and Ta-Nehisi Coates, fiction by Lauren Groff and Hanya Yanagihara, and poetry by Terrance Hayes and Ada Limón. In a “leap-out-of-the-bathtub moment,” as he told the New York Times, an American scholar has found the earliest draft of the King James Bible, a notebook from the early seventeenth century in which one of the translators seems to have puzzled out his allotted section and then taken over
Marlon James Marlon James—who once deleted the manuscript of his first novel after having it rejected seventy-eight times—yesterday became the first Jamaican writer to win the Booker Prize, for A Brief History of Seven Killings. It seems some of the bigger magazines have been feeling the lack of “a very passionate audience of millennial males,” but never fear, Condé Nast has solved the problem by buying Pitchfork Media, owner of the independent music site. If you hadn’t been feeling especially worried lately about how to please male millennials, the Atlantic notes that this might be “a reminder that larger
Marilynne Robinson The winner of this year’s Booker Prize will be announced in a few hours’ time—meanwhile, you can hear from both the candidates and the judges. For T magazine, Rachel Kushner goes to Santa Cruz for a conversation with her friend Jonathan Franzen (whom, “for the record,” she considers “principally a comic writer”) about Edward Snowden, Faust, and the rivalry between Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. And if that doesn’t seem quite stately enough, for the New York Review of Books, President Obama goes to Des Moines, Iowa, for a long chat with Marilynne Robinson (you can only read the