Google launched its long-awaited e-book venture yesterday, cleverly integrating their new e-book shop within the already popular Google Books. “Reading Unbound,” the G-sages branded the service (with a nod to Aeschylus), explaining that “Google eBooks are stored in the cloud, so there is no file to download if you want to read on your computer, phone, or tablet.” The three million e-books already available can be read on most devices that aren’t a Kindle. Google’s e-book rating system will be based on reviews from the online bookworm community Goodreads. The American Booksellers Association has partnered with Google, allowing many
Rachel Dewoskin At HTMLGIANT Roxane Gay bemoans the lack of diversity in this year’s Best American Short Stories, writing “segregation is alive and well when it comes to what we read,” and challenges readers to name five black, Asian, and Latino authors. The Rumpus responds. The Economist, apparently unconcerned with the idea of gender balance, has blithely posted its best books of the year list, with no women authors in the fiction or poetry categories (a remarkable oversight in a year when books like Room, A Visit From the Goon Squad, Inferno, Nox, et al., were published) and with
Barry Hannah This weekend, Bob Dylan aficionados will converge on Manhattan’s 14th Street Y for events exploring his watershed work with The Band. There’s a photo exhibition tonight, and a symposium and concert on Sunday. The participants are a freewheelin’ mix, including authors such as Greil Marcus, Christopher Ricks, and Dana Spiotta, filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker, and musicians from the bands The Fiery Furnaces and John Wesley Harding, as well as William G. Scheele, a curator and photographer who worked as the group’s roadie. Beginning at midnight on Sunday, Kyle Minor of the blog HTMLGIANT will be reading Long,
Thomas Frank Google’s long-delayed e-book venture, Google Editions, is reportedly gearing up to launch in the next month. “Google Editions hopes to upend the existing e-book market by offering an open, ‘read anywhere’ model that is different from many competitors.” Most notably Amazon. Michel Houellebecq borrows freely from Wikipedia in his new Prix Goncourt-winning La carte et le territoire. Is it copyright violation? And if it isn’t, is it OK to put Houellebecq’s entire novel online for free? One blogger thinks so… Critic and poet Stephen Burt’s answer to the question “What can a book review do for a
Stuart Murdoch Stuart Murdoch, the front man for Scottish band Belle and Sebastian, has a new book called The Celestial Café, a collection of diaries and ruminations from 2002-2006. Don’t let Murdoch’s reputation for being insufferably twee—or his disclaimer that his new volume is “very light on the subjects of drug taking, orgies and general debauchery”—dissuade you from reading. Murdoch’s lyrics demonstrate a razor-sharp wit and a penchant for self-deflating satire, and is peerless at describing the everyday trials of the self-conscious, literary, and shy; we can’t wait to see what he does in prose. Tonight at the French
Rowan Somerville We were rooting for Tony Blair’s former spin-doctor, Alastair Campbell, to win the prize most writers try to avoid like the Clap: The Literary Review’s Bad Sex award. However, Campbell was outdone in the contest for supreme raunchy ridiculousness by Rowan Somerville, whose book The Shape of Her won the dubious honor. Somerville has joined elite company—including Norman Mailer, John Updike, and Tom Wolfe—in part for a passage that compared an act of copulation to “a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin.” Salon.com is looking for a possible buyer to help slow the
Jennifer Gilmore We were cheered to see Justin Spring’s Secret Historian, Jennifer Gilmore’s Something Red, Elif Batuman’s The Possessed, and many other worthy titles on the New York Times’s 100 notable books of 2010 list. The omissions, however, were sometimes inexplicable (Tom McCarthy’s novel C), and often indicative of how unadventurous the paper of record’s books section is these days (nothing like Eileen Myles’s Inferno or Joshua Cohen’s Witz in sight). Reading the list, we wondered: Is there a Times quota for mid-century baseball biographies? The first batch of Vladimir Nabokov’s love letters to his wife Vera have been
Eileen Myles, photo by Leopoldine Core. AN INTERVIEW WITH EILEEN MYLES “If you’re interested in poetry, I’ll give you lesbianism, and if you’re interested in lesbianism, I’ll give you poetry.” Inferno is the latest book by poet, novelist, essayist, performer, and one-time presidential hopeful Eileen Myles. (It’s true, she ran as a write-in candidate in 1992.) Eileen did not call Inferno a memoir, even though it sort of is. Maybe one could call it a remembrance. Eileen calls it a novel. In the process of remembering, she lets go a frantic and enlightened rush of recall, impressions, and wit.
Tom Waits The Guardian reports that the sublimely gruff-voiced singer Tom Waits is publishing his first book of poetry, Hard Ground, a collaboration with photographer Michael O’Brien. In a 1975 interview Waits said, “I don’t like the stigma that comes with being called a poet . . . So I call what I’m doing an improvisational adventure or an inebriational travelogue.” The tired thesis that poetry is on the decline is being posited again by Joseph Epstein in Commentary magazine. Why does that sound so familiar? Rand Paul has scored a book deal with Hachette Book Group’s Center Street
The Anthology of Rap display at Toronto’s Type books. Granta’s brand-new “Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists” is their first fully translated issue. There’s more bad news for the beleaguered editors of the Anthology of Rap, who have been criticized over the past few weeks for transcription errors in their volume. Now, some of the book’s advisory board members are trying to distance themselves from the project: “The board lent its credibility to the editors and in turn, the editors did not approach the subject matter with the proper rigor.” And, even worse, Grandmaster Caz, one of the artists who
Listen to This author Alex Ross. Was Gawker’s posting of scanned pages from Sarah Palin’s forthcoming book illegal? Gawker has been court-ordered to take them down, with a trial set for later this month. Denton v. Palin may be the car-crash/catnip trial of the century. The Google team has posted an e-book, 20 Things I Learned About Browsing and the Web, which is perhaps a preview of what the long-rumored Google Editions publishing imprint’s product would look like. If so, the format is what we’d expect from the slightly evil geniuses at the G-team: slick and user-friendly, but still
Jaimy Gordon, photo by Brian Widdis for The Wall Street Journal Vladimir Nabokov dedicated every novel he wrote the same way: “to Vera.” This weekend, the Russian magazine Snob is publishing a selection of love letters from Vladimir to his wife over a fifty-year period (she burned her half of the correspondence). Literary longshot: Jaimy Gordon’s surprising National Book Award win for her horse-racing novel, Lord of Misrule, is perhaps even more inspiring than the Seabiscuit story. The book was ignored before it was nominated for America’s most prestigious literary prize, and as the New York Times reports, even
George Saunders The National Book Awards were announced last night, and the honors for nonfiction went to rock icon Patti Smith for her memoir of Robert Mapplethorpe, Just Kids. (Read Greg Milner’s review. Listen to the Bookworm interview.) “There’s nothing more beautiful in the material world than the book,” Smith said in her acceptance speech. (Smith will appear again tonight at a tribute for the late novelist Jim Carroll.) We were excited to see that the relatively unknown Jaimy Gordon won for her novel Lord of Misrule. Tom Wolfe won the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (a.k.a.
Jonathan Galassi Farrar, Straus Giroux president Jonathan Galassi has just completed an impressive new translation of Giacomo Leopardi’s Canti, the nineteenth-century collection of forty-one poems that Joseph Luzzi characterizes in the new Bookforum as covering a “dazzling variety of styles and themes, from confessions of private pain and humiliation to philosophical satires and grand pronouncements on current events.” At the Work in Progress blog, Galassi shares images of his Canti proof pages, offering a fascinating glimpse at the revisions and edits that went into making his musical and faithful en face edition. As he writes: “Trying to make Leopardi
Jay-Z at the New York Public Library, photo by Jori Klein. Bookworms and b-boys (and girls) were buoyant last night at the New York Public Library’s Jay-Z appearance with Cornel West. Fans showed up hours before the 7pm event, giddy with anticipation at seeing the music biz’s “number-one supplier.” Jay-Z is promoting his lavish new autobiography, Decoded, which mixes memoir and a labyrinthine self-deconstruction of his lyrics. Tickets were notoriously hard to come by, and those lucky enough to have them weren’t above gloating (“We’re all VIPs!” someone in the general admissions line shouted during the long wait to
James Frey Joan Didion once wrote that “a writer is always selling someone out.” That phrase takes on multiple meanings in Suzanne Mozes’s New York magazine story about author and self-proclaimed rebel James Frey’s new publishing company, Full Fathom Five. Frey himself is obviously taking young, ambitious authors for a ride, offering them contracts custom-made to screw artists over. Thankfully, Mozes does a great job of selling Frey out, too, nailing his false charisma and exposing the insidious contractual maneuvers his company has worked hard to keep secret. President Obama’s new book for kids, Of Thee I Sing, goes
Bertolt Brecht British professor Stephen Parker has discovered that Bertolt Brecht probably had an undiagnosed rheumatic fever, though doctors thought Brecht was just a hypochondriac (he later died from a heart attack likely caused by the fever). Professor Parker says his discovery provides new insight into the prickly German playwright: “it affected his behavior, making him more exaggerated in his actions, and prone to over-reaction. . . . He carried the problem all his life and compensated for this underlying weakness by projecting a macho image to show himself as strong.” On Wednesday, the National Book Award will be
Tina Brown The long-rumored merger between Newsweek and the Daily Beast is finally official, with Tina Brown as the editor-in-chief of both publications. Brown writes of the partnership: “Working at the warp-speed of a 24/7 news operation, we now add the versatility of being able to develop ideas and investigations that require a different narrative pace suited to the medium of print.” As the Observer notes, Brown’s last print publication was the luckless Talk magazine, which began with a bang in 1999 before folding in 2002. Last week, Paul Devlin at Slate pointed out some transcription errors in The
Published last month, Bound to Last is a new anthology for which thirty authors pay homage to their “most cherished books.” There are some excellent and in some cases deeply inspired entries: Ed Park geeks out over the Dungeon Masters Guide; Nick Flynn assembles a series of personal, melancholic fragments about Ryszard Kapuscinski’s Shadow of the Sun. But the most personal essay is by artist Karen Green, the widow of David Foster Wallace. Her topic is The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel, but the essay basically uses quotes from that book as a framework for her reflections about DFW’s suicide—about