Geoffrey O’Brien The Awl offers a list of McNally Jackson’s most-stolen books, which reveals that either (a) the people shoplifting book is a rapidly aging demographic or (b) young shoplifters need to improve their reading tastes. Critic and novelist Janice Harayda lists the 5 Most Overused Put-Downs in Book Reviews. If you’re in New York tonight, you can catch a reading by Bookforum contributor Geoffrey O’Brien, who will present his new book, The Fall of the House of Walworth, a true story of patricide and madness in Gilded Age Saratoga. Separated at birth? The cover for Eric Toussaint and Damien Millet’s forthcoming book,
Jennifer Egan Barnes and Noble has put itself up for sale as annual profits have decreased dramatically over the past three years, from more than 135 million to about 36 million. Barnes and Noble chairman Leonard Riggio, who founded the chain in 1965 with a single store in New York City, is said to be a possible buyer, though the price is still in question. As analyst James McQuivey put it, “How do you value an asset for the future when the entire market is being essentially turned upside down?” Bookslut blogger Jessa Crispin writes a public letter to an author who, in response
Brooklyn’s Greenlight Bookstore New York magazine has a feature on the city’s indie bookstores, including a breakdown of sales and operating costs for Brooklyn’s Greenlight Bookstore (they actually make a profit of more than $11,000 a month), a poll of some NY authors’ favorite shops (Jonathan Ames praises BookCourt for allowing him to have a knife-thrower at a recent reading), and recommended fall titles from booksellers. Always look on the bright side of life: Tim Martin of the Telegraph, granted access to the British Library’s recently acquired J. G. Ballard papers, found a cheering note in the manuscript margins of the grisly dystopian novel Crash, where Ballard wrote in all-caps: “STRESS GOOD ASPECTS.” Focusing
Brooklyn Book Festival participant Kate Christensen (Photo: Jon Lewis). Details of next month’s Brooklyn Book Festival are starting to be announced. There’s a stellar lineup of authors slated to participate in the free September 12th event, including many of the borough’s best authors and some national and international recruits. Some credulous Californians are suing Apple because its ad copy says “reading on iPad is just like reading a book,” but it isn’t—especially if you try to read an iPad in the sun. Internet doomsayer Nicholas Carr reports that “our hyperactive online habits are damaging the mental faculties we need to process and understand lengthy textual information.”
Stephen Burt Salman Rushdie, Noam Chomsky, Jennifer Egan, and other writers have signed a letter pledging to boycott Arizona until it revokes its new SB1070 immigration law. Last May, David Biespiel wrote an article for the Poetry Foundation arguing that poets should assume a stronger role in the “the life of American Democracy”—maybe even run for office. Now, Stephen Burt (the author of the excellent Close Calls with Nonsense) offers a rousing reply, explaining why this would be “bad for our poetry,” and “bad for our politics.” “I quit being a Christian,” says a Facebook post by bestselling author
Eileen Myles Agent Andrew Wylie’s new ebook imprint, Odyssey Editions, is making publishers angry. Random House is severing ties with the agency, nixing all new book deals, while Macmillan US’s chief executive, John Sargent, said he was “appalled” by the deal. Author Matt Stewart gives the most sensible analysis of the battle we’ve seen: He calls Random House thieves and Wylie a “vicious negotiater,” and builds on this point: “Both parties are behaving like assholes.” If you’re in New York tonight, Granta magazine is celebrating the release of its latest issue with a reading by Netherland author (and Obama favorite)
Andrea Levy Novelist and critic Tom LeClair has some advice for contemporary writers: Treat your interviewers well. They read your books, and they may have the final word. “To Jeff Bezos and everyone else who brings books to the world I say: thank you,” concludes Ruth Franklin, writing “In Defense of Amazon” at the New Republic, a response to Colin Robinson’s recent article in The Nation, “The Trouble With Amazon.” The 2010 Man Booker Prize for fiction’s longlist has been announced, and apparently, the Booker judges are feeling wistful for the past. There’s a distinct batch of historical fiction in the mix, including some books that
Stan Lee Novelist David Markson, who passed away in June, was a fan of the Strand Bookstore. Recently, the Strand started selling the author’s heavily annotated personal library, which has been “scattered among the stacks.” Alex Abramovich reports, while scooping up many of the treasures. In school we learned that the English novel was born in the hands of Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson. In his new book, The Novel, Steven Moore, a longtime editor at Dalkey Archive Press, offers an alternate history, tracing the form back more than a thousand years. He finds that “Petronius’s Satyricon … [looks] like a Thomas Pynchon novel.” Moore’s
David Means Ron Rosenbaum, fresh from the fight over the posthumous publication of Vladimir Nabokov’s unfinished novel The Original of Laura, steels himself for the “next Nabokov controversy.” This time, it is over the poem within Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire, (“written” by character John Shade), which Ginko Press plans to publish as a standalone in a lavish edition this fall, blessed by both Nabokov’s son Dmitri and biographer Brian Boyd. Rosenbaum is all for it, writing: “I think the Gingko Press edition will provoke an important argument, and more importantly get people to experience the pleasures of the poem with or without its mad annotations.” Means’s
Louise Erdrich To-do list: New Yorker indie-rock and poetry fans, sell your soul to try to gain admittance to the poetry reading by the amazing Silver Jews frontman David Berman, whose cult-classic book Actual Air was one of Open City Books’s first publications (along with Sam Lipsyte’s classic Venus Drive). Aside from a few poems he published in The Believer, and the cartoons collected in the book The Portable February, Berman has been quiet as a published author for more than a decade. Here’s your chance to hear what this armchair surrealist has been up to outside of the
Franz Kafka The Trial: On Monday a delegation of important-looking men representing powerful bureaucracies pried open safe-deposit boxes in Tel Aviv containing a trove of mysterious writings, while an heir laying claim to the boxes shouted, “It’s mine, it’s mine.” Now there’s a tangle of legal wrangling to be sorted through in court, and the materials, which happen to be a batch of unpublished Franz Kafka writings (reportedly containing letters, drawings, and manuscripts), may not see the light of day for many years. Apparently, there’s only one word to describe the situation (beginning with “K” and ending in “esque”),
Thomas Frank At The Paris Review, recently hired editor Lorin Stein and poetry editor Robyn Creswell are rejecting some poems that their predecessors had accepted. Daniel Nester is reporting on the debacle, which he’s dubbed “The Great Paris Review Poetry Purge of 2010,” over at the blog We Who Are About to Die. (Meanwhile, Blake Butler pens a satirical list of Paris Review rejects, and the Poetry Foundation scratches its chin while pondering the matter.) For a glimpse of some authors Stein does like, check out his spirited appraisal of five books that should be in any reviewer’s library. When your computer crashes, what do you do? Throw your hands up
Anthony Doerr This fall the Los Angeles Review of Books will launch an online only review headed by Tom Lutz, chair of the UC Riverside creative writing department. Two years in the making, the Review has signed up some tony contributing editors, including T. C. Boyle, Carolyn See, and Marisa Silver (among others), and Lutz vows it will be “the best-paying book review outlet around.” Until he can launch a print edition, that is. The first issue promises Jane Smiley writing about Jessica Mitford and James Ellroy on Beethoven. Amazon reports that ebooks outsold hardcovers for the first time over the past three months—or as Amazon CEO
Christopher Hitchens Christopher Hitchens recently canceled the book tour for his new memoir, Hitch-22, in order to undergo a round of chemotherapy treatment for esophagus cancer. So what does the devout atheist think of people praying for him to get well? In a recent interview, Hitchens says, “I think that prayer and holy water, and things like that are all fine. They don’t do any good, but they don’t necessarily do any harm. It’s touching to be thought of in that way.” Jimmy Carter: President, Nobel Peace Prize winner, peanut farmer, and . . . erotic poet? Amazon.com built its online business around easy access to
Tonight at Brooklyn’s BookCourt bookstore, David Mitchell reads from his new novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, reviewed in the latest issue of Bookforum by William Deresiewicz, who writes that after the pyrotechnics of Mitchell’s first four novels, “The wunderkind—forty-one by now—is ripening, it seems, into a middle period of subtler effects and sustained emotions.”
James Franco as poet Allen Ginsberg (Photo Credit: Sundance Film Festival 2010). Former poet laureate Billy Collins dislikes the havoc that is wreaked on poems when they are converted to ebooks: “The critical difference between prose and poetry is that prose is kind of like water and will become the shape of any vessel you pour it into to. Poetry is like a piece of sculpture and can easily break.” Allen Ginsberg wasn’t shy about promoting “Howl” as “an all-purpose cultural barometer,” as John Palatella observed in Bookforum in 2006, the fiftieth anniversary of the book’s publication. In 1967, when asked if
Ryu Murakami The website I Write Like will analyze your prose and tell you if it resembles H. P. Lovecraft, Vladimir Nabokov, Dan Brown, or one of the other forty famous writers in its database. Margaret Atwood gave it a try and found she didn’t write like herself; rather, the database pegged her as Stephen King. We can only imagine Nabokov’s incredulity at being told by a computer that someone else writes like him, or worse, that he wrote like anyone else (especially Stephen King). Ryu Murakami’s new novel, A Singing Whale, is the first by a well-known author to go straight to the iPad.
Jon Thurber Jon Thurber has been named the new Book Review editor at the Los Angeles Times. Thurber (no relations to James) is a thirty-eight year veteran of the paper, and will take charge of all aspects of book coverage, including the online book section, the Jacket Copy blog, and the print book reviews and features. He has filled many roles during his time at the paper and is perhaps best known for his recent tenure as obit editor, which lasted for 11 years and produced many hundreds of articles under Thurber’s own byline. Here’s hoping he isn’t called on to pen one more .
Harvey Pekar Splendid Americans: Harvey Pekar and Tuli Kupferberg—a pair of radical nonconformists whose literary output was perhaps a mere by-product of their grander refusal to fit in—both passed away yesterday. Pekar’s death at the age of 70 put us in mind of his most famous public exit—his last appearance on the David Letterman show in 1988, when he ranted at an exasperated Letterman, ending his tenure as a late-80s regular on the show. Pekar also made an appearance in the pages of Bookforum in 2003. Reviewing Peter Kuper’s graphic adaptation of Kafka’s tale of self-recrimination, “Metamorphosis,” he wrote that the book was “no match for the original