Denis Johnson Writer Mary Karr says making a book trailer, often a required part of an author’s publicity tour of duty, “is, in a word, humiliating.” We’ve been underwhelmed by most of the quick, awkward videos (John Wray’s funny recent trailer for his novel Lowboy, featuring Zach Galifianakis, being an exception) we’ve seen, until now: Behold, the trailer for Gary Shteyngart’s forthcoming novel Super Sad True Love Story. “You are not supposed to point out that Nazi inspirations have visibly taken root among present-day Islamists,” writes Paul Berman, as he takes on critics of his polemic The Flight of the Intellectuals. Novelist Denis Johnson’s papers have been acquired by the Harry Ransom Center at the

As the fiftieth anniversary of To Kill a Mockingbird’s publication is celebrated this weekend, Harper Lee once again has found the spotlight. Meanwhile, her classic novel about the Jim Crow South has sold over thirty million copies, and continues to be patronized. Last year, Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article (“The Courthouse Ring”) and more recently, Allen Barra’s Wall Street Journal piece (“What ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ Isn’t”), criticized the book for what is perceived as its mild-mannered liberalism. We’ve asked Nicolaus Mills, author of The Crowd in American Literature and Like a Holy Crusade: Mississippi 1964—The Turning of the Civil Rights Movement in America, and a professor of literature and American studies

A. L. Kennedy iTunes has made album cover art all but obsolete—could book cover design be next? The Casual Optimist blog doesn’t think so—it provides edifying links, interviews, and highlights of the best cover art—all dedicated to the idea that cover design is vital to the book trade. Novelist A. L. Kennedy writes that “these days authors are also judged by their covers.” As writers make the rounds of author appearances, TV interviews, and publicity photo shoots, their looks sometimes seem almost as important as their books. As Kennedy notes, this can be a source of author anxiety: “As age and gravity assert themselves, my

Damali Ayo William Golding may have had good reasons to write the dystopic Lord of the Flies; John Carey’s new biography of the unhappy novelist reveals some of the indignities he had to endure, including this Navy mishap: Golding once “caused an explosion in his pants by placing bomb detonators and a battery in the same pocket.” Emily Gould continues her critique of her former employer, Gawker Media, writing that sites like Jezebel “tap into the market force of . . . ‘outrage world,'” turning women against one another for the sake of the almighty Pageview. Meanwhile, the big-picture thinkers at Ad Age describe how its readers must

David Grossman Blurb busters: Nicole Krauss really loved fellow novelist David Grossman’s forthcoming To the End of the Land, writing of the novel, “To read it is to have yourself taken apart, undone, touched at the place of your own essence; it is to be turned back, as if after a long absence, into a human being.” Bloggers at the Conversational Reading (“The Painfully Wrought Blurb,”) MobyLives (“sometimes, a blurb can kill you,”) and Bookninja (“When Blurbs Bite,”) are all crying foul over Krauss’s “overwritten” praise, while The Guardian asks readers: Can you outblurb Krauss? Perhaps Paul Auster already has: “Flaubert created his Emma, Tolstoy made his

Google Editions, the top-secret, soon-to-be-launched e-book label, has just inked a deal with the American Booksellers Association to become the primary source of e-books on hundreds of indie booksellers’ websites. Our newest Poet Laureate, W. S. Merwin, has made a point of living a quiet Buddhist’s life out in Hawaii. It’s wonderful then to imagine him brandishing a beer bottle and fending off the Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa and his bodyguards as the Tibetan guru tried to force Merwin and a girlfriend to strip during a drunken party. That was the scene thirty-five years ago, in what has become known as “The Great Naropa

Poet Laureate W. S. Merwin The Library of Congress has chosen the oft-honored W. S. Merwin as the 2010–11 Poet Laureate. The eighty-two year old poet and translator doesn’t fancy rousing himself from island life in Maui, as he told the New York Times: “I do like a very quiet life . . . I can’t keep popping back and forth between here and Washington,” though he told the Washington Post “I am very happy to do it at a time when there is someone that I respect so much in the White House.” Known for his astute ecological poems, we wonder if Merwin’s first official act will be to

When J. M. Coetzee is smiling, the whole world smiles with him. Vladimir Nabokov’s writing career got its start while he was exiled in Berlin during the 1920s and ’30s, when he “described how Berlin’s 300,000 Russian émigrés endured life after the Bolshevik Revolution.” Lesley Chamberlain parses the “artistically formative” years the great writer spent in the German capital.  Final Cut: With the rise of multimedia in e-books and the ubiquity of tablet readers, will book editors become video editors? At an apparently slow news day at The Guardian, the paper reports that the usually dour J. M. Coetzee cracked a smile at a recent

Ben Sonnenberg’s window, from Matteo Pericoli’s The City Out My Window On the Paris Review blog, Lorin Stein pays tribute to the influential editor of Grand Street, Ben Sonnenberg, who passed away last week at age 73. Stein writes “Although Grand Street may never have had more than a few thousand subscribers, it was one of the great literary magazines of our time,” and posts an excerpt from Matteo Pericoli’s recent book of New York City views featuring Sonnenberg, who describes the vantage from his window with typical eloquence: “Fortunately for my wife and me, the modern buildings of Donald Trump, with their ugly

Feed Magazine co-founder Stefanie Syman The early work of web stars such as Ana Marie Cox and Josh Marshall, novelist Sam Lipsyte, music critic Alex Ross, and Bookforum co-editor Chris Lehmann, as well as many others, has been put online at the Feed Magazine archives, an online webzine launched fifteen years ago by Steven Johnson and Stefanie Syman that ran through 2001. The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” writers to watch list has been one of the biggest stories of the summer so far, but half the fun of the list is arguing about it. The latest counter-list comes from Dzanc books, who have polled “nearly 100 independent publishers, agents,

Susan Orlean On Tuesday, Susan Orlean posted a piece on her New Yorker blog about the publishing world, in which she identified everyone involved by letter instead of name (e.g. Editor A, Publisher W). The Observer thinks it has solved the puzzle, but is there a letter—or a number—missing? The Authors Guild versus Google case continues to drag on, more than five years since it began, and four months since a final settlement was supposed to be reached. With so much time on their hands, the litigants may find diversion—if not solace—in reading Bleak House, available for free—and in full—on Google Books. Abraham Lincoln was a gifted poet. At Slate, Robert Pinsky

Reagan Arthur Follow the adventures of Reagan Arthur, Book Editor, on the Paris Review blog’s Culture Diary. In the first installment of the ongoing journal, Arthur travels to Toronto, meets George Pelecanos, and then at 4:30, after reading some manuscripts, takes a well-deserved nap. In Paris, the Shakespeare and Company festival drew about six-thousand people to a tent near Notre Dame last weekend to talk about “Storytelling and Politics,” but all anyone really wanted to talk about was soccer, Lauren Elkin reports. Still, there was some literary chat—Martin Amis calling himself a “millenarian feminist” was perhaps the festival’s most memorable quote. Judging books

Tom Bissell Tom Bissell’s new book Extra Lives is a treatise on the cultural significance of video games; though Bissell likens gaming to drug addiction, his cocaine turns out to be reviewer Dwight Garner’s Ambien. The blogging platform WordPress is “the 21st-century equivalent of Gutenberg’s printing press,” making media stars out of writers like Justin Halpern, who tweeted and blogged his way to the top of the bestseller list from his parent’s home, the latest in a string of blog-to-book deals.  It isn’t “the internet that threatens little magazines and journals . . . it’s the waning of communities of readers,” writes Overland editor Jeff Sparrow. So, what is

Henry Roth An American gripe: We’ve asked Henry Roth biographer Steven Kellman to comment on the recent articles in Slate and Harper’s that object to the posthumous edits exacted by Willing Davidson on Roth’s trove of archived manuscript pages (known as “Batch II”). In an email interview, Kellman, who reviewed An American Type for Bookforum, writes:  “At Slate, Judith Shulevitz complains that An American Type reads too much like a New Yorker writer . . . The truth is that Roth was a New Yorker writer, not simply because two sections from Batch II appeared in the magazine in 2006 or because Willing Davidson, who edited An American Type, was an editor there. Four Roth stories appeared in The

The New York Times has been granted access to John Updike’s archives. Among its many revelations is a letter that the nineteen-year-old Updike wrote to his parents: “We do not need men like Proust and Joyce; men like this are a luxury, an added fillip that an abundant culture can produce only after the more basic literary need has been filled. . . . We need great artists who are willing to accept restrictions, and who love their environments with such vitality that they can produce an epic out of the Protestant ethic.” The Times fawningly characterizes it as “a prescient formulation of what

Gerbrand Bakker Dutch writer Gerbrand Bakker has won the 2010 IMPAC prize for his debut novel, The Twin, published in the US by Brooklyn’s Archipelago Books. Now that this season’s awarding of literary laurels has concluded, catch up on all the winners at The Millions, who have updated their list of prizewinners. Atlas Shrugged is coming soon to a theater near you, as it has finally begun shooting, but the question remains: Will it Be Worse Than the Book?  In “An Author’s Redemption from Ignorance,” professor and author Barbara J. King sets out to explain what writers don’t understand about publishing.

José Saramago Hearing the news of José Saramago’s passing today at the age of 87, we couldn’t help but think of the author’s playful parrying with death and immortality in his recent novel, Death With Interruptions, in which the reaper takes a vacation and causes people to live too long. As Jason Weiss wrote in his 2009 review for Bookforum, “the implications of life everlasting become evident, and the blessing begins to resemble a curse . . . [Saramago] refreshes the old trope of immortality by treating it as fertile ground for playing out his incisive variations, exploring not only our fear of

Implementing an RSS reader can be an aggressive step towards organizing the glut of online information, but as the unread count grows, so does the anxiety—and culling feeds can be just as painful as discarding a book.

When Henry Roth died in 1995, he left thousands of manuscript pages behind. The New Yorker published two pieces drawn from the trove, “God the Novelist,” and “Freight,” and a young fiction editor at the magazine, Willing Davidson, shaped the pages into the novel An American Type. At Slate, Judith Shulevitz questions the posthumous edits, writing “the saddest ending of all would be if Roth’s amorphous, neurotic . . . ‘sense of life’ was precisely what got polished out of his work.” Meanwhile, at The National, Sam Munson calls Davidson’s sculpting of the novel “heroic,” while in Harper’s (registration required), Joshua Cohen bemoans the “gentrification of Henry Roth.”

Elizabeth Streb’s Breakthru, 1997 As if the Paris Review’s defeat at the hands of n+1 in softball this week wasn’t bad enough, the Review blog’s recap of the game is being called for a balk, as the Awl takes issue with their blog’s “transgression of English.” A. M. Homes chats with the death-defying feminist artist Elizabeth Streb (including a video of Streb behind the scenes), whose “extreme action events” keep audiences wondering when they should duck; author Danielle Dutton reads from her forthcoming novel S P R A W L, and much more from the summer issue of BOMB.  Tonight, blogger Maud Newton interviews novelist Sarah Waters, author of The Little Stranger.