To celebrate Bloomsday, Paris-based blogger Lauren Elkin chats with Keri Walsh, editor of the Letters of Sylvia Beach, and Sylvia Beach Whitman, heir to both Beach’s name and (now in a new location on the Left Bank) her bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, which first published Joyce’s magnum opus in 1922.
When Ulysses were first published in the 1920’s, it was confiscated for being obscene. Ninety years later, Apple seemed to take the same tack, asking developers of an illustrated iPad Ulysses app to remove pages that contained nudity, before backing down, just in time for Bloomsday. Today is indeed the day to celebrate all things Ulysses, with Tablet sponsoring a reading featuring Joshua Cohen and Ben Greenman (among others), “putting the Bloom in Bloomsday,” and Symphony Space is hosting Bloomsday on Broadway. What Americans used to read: the Top 10 lists for the years 1990, 1980, 1970, etc., down to 1910. We all know of the “Bump,” where authors see the
Clark Hoyt Reading the New York Times can be a soporific (#12) experience, but not when the paper mines its data for the fifty Most Frequently Looked-up Words of 2010. Philip B. Corbett, who is charged with pointing out slips of style, grammar, and usage in the Times with alacrity (#36), muses on some of the “fancy words” that appear in the paper, wondering if its readers know what the heck jejune (#25) means. Meanwhile Clark Hoyt, the Times public editor, departs with praise for the paper, despite having to settle solipsistic (#9) internecine (#11) squabbles between the paper’s op-ed polemicists (#42) like Maureen Dowd, whose coining of the word baldenfreude (#6) puzzled nearly 5,000 Times readers. But as the Awl
Katherine Dunn, photo by Thomas Boyd for The Oregonian Still a Contender: Katherine Dunn has a new story in the summer Paris Review, her first fiction since her Geek Love was nominated for a 1989 National Book Award. (There is also an interview at the blog.) Dunn has spent the past two decades immersed in the boxing world, researching for a follow-up book called Cut Man and reporting on the sweet science for various boxing magazines (collected in the volume One Ring Circus). When she’s isn’t slugging would-be purse snatchers or reviewing boxing books, Dunn is still at work on her follow-up novel, which she reports will soon be finished. Stieg Larsson once sent two stories to
Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C. The World Cup begins today in South Africa, and the New Republic has enlisted novelists, such as Aleksandar Hemon, authors like Tom Vanderbilt, as well as critics and TNR staff to detail all the action at their blog Goal Post. Of course there’s more to life in South Africa than soccer, as novelist André Brink writes: “There’s so much constantly to react to in the world in which we live, and in a country like South Africa, that can become a full-time occupation;” from Bookforum’s pages, Jennifer Egan reviews Brink’s 2008 novel Other Lives. The Wall Street Journal investigates how digital
Amin Maalouf Are books the LPs of the future? “Of course, the book has been around a lot longer and is far more deeply entrenched in our vision of culture—both what it is and what we want it to be—than the LP, which turned out to be a disposable format, a means to an end. Yet what the digital revolution in the music industry shows us, I think, is that what people want is music: the format doesn’t matter nearly as much as the product.” Do people, then, want nothing outside the text? Actually, long-playing records may be the literal
Brenda Wineapple The New Yorker has anointed its twenty young writers under forty who “capture the inventiveness and the vitality of contemporary American fiction,” and Farrar, Straus Giroux has announced it will publish a paperback anthology of the chosen ones. How were they chosen? What are the stories about? Tainted love, mostly. What’s the upside? Choire Sicha offers Ten Affirmations. The takeaway? Forty is still young when it comes to writing fiction. Brenda Wineapple writes that American literature in the 19th century “speaks in the 21st in terms we have not yet abandoned for all our sophistication, technology, globalism, and panache.” A 2007 appearance of the late author David Markson reading
The iBookstore is coming to the iPhone, expanding the e-book market to the pocket-sized device. If you put stock in Steve Job’s iBook sales numbers, that’s very good news for publishing. Yesterday’s announcement of the iPhone 4 was measured in comparison to the frenzied hype that welcomed the iPad, since many of the phone’s features have been known for a while—thanks to the checkbook journalism of Gizmodo, which purloined an early iPhone 4 prototype and produced the definitive guide to the gizmo. Literary mixes: New York magazine has asked authors to recommend books for the summer: “the perfect time to dig deep into books, classics and otherwise, you’ve missed.”
David Markson This is Not an Obituary: David Markson has died at age eighty-two. Markson, who began his career writing off-kilter genre fiction, kept the unconventional novel alive long after ’60s-era critics and readers had retreated to tamer stuff. In books like Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988), Reader’s Block (1996), and The Is Not a Novel (2001), Markson achieved the grail so many American avant-garde novelists had sought: crafting radical experiments in form that were utterly compelling to read. His conversations about craft were almost as enthralling as his literary output, and proved inspirational for many writers daunted by the blank page (especially David Shields). Here’s an interview between
Michael Silverblatt Shakespeare Company, the bookstore whose lineage stretches back to Sylvia Beach’s 1919 shop, which first published Ulysses, is starting a literary magazine and a prize. Twain saw being interviewed as torture, Hemingway found it akin to hand-to-hand combat, while Nabokov agreed only to be questioned via typewritten transcript (the better to polish his prose before it saw print). In Bookforum’s pages, Albert Mobillio, introducing a section on interviewing the interviewers, wrote that interviews are a “high wire act for writers.” Michael Silverblatt has been conversing with authors for twenty years, often provoking bouts of astonished silence in the wake of his lengthy questions. In
Maaza Mengiste. Photo by Miriam Berkley. On Wednesday night, organizers of the Brooklyn Book Festival announced part of its 2010 line-up at a mingle that took place at stately Brooklyn Borough Hall. As publishing types mixed with writers such as Colson Whitehead, Chuck Klosterman, and others, Johnny Temple (the onetime Girls Against Boys bassist and editor of Akashic Books) introduced curators who named some of the writers confirmed for the fest. As always, it is a stellar bunch: Whitehead, Jonathan Lethem, Jennifer Egan, Mary Gaitskill, Joshua Clover, Rob Sheffield, Maaza Mengiste, Joyce Carol Oates, Dorothy Allison, Stephen Elliott and more.
Mark English’s illustration for John Cheever’s “The Geometry of Love.” From the archives of American angst: The Saturday Evening Post has digitized and posted the 1966 John Cheever story “The Geometry of Love.” Though the story appears in Cheever’s Collected Stories, it is edifying to see a story by “the suburban squire” presented in its original context—a vividly illustrated Post spread, with its eyebrow-raising tag line: “How convenient to reduce your marital difficulties to a mathematical formula! How convenient—and how dangerous!” Though the Post jumped at the chance to publish the story, it was only after the New Yorker passed on it, with New Yorker editor William Maxwell viewing it as definitive
Peter Beinart continues to assail Israel’s leadership and its American supporters in an article condemning yesterday’s flotilla raid, which killed nine people and resulted in the arrest of more than six hundred activists (including Swedish writer Henning Mankell). Israel and American Zionism are topics conspicuously absent from Beinart’s new book The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris (reviewed in Bookforum by Jim Sleeper), but Beinart has had a lot to say about them recently.
Nay Phone Latt Blogging can be dangerous, at least according to Burmese authorities, who have imprisoned Nay Phone Latt for his posts; poets are still suspect, too—Saw Wei, who was locked up in Burma for writing a poem, has finally been released after more than two years in prison for “inducing crime against public tranquility” with his verse, which had “General Than Shwe is crazy with power” encoded within the poem. I got a scheme—for a magazine! The beginnings of what Philip Roth dubbed “an imaginative assault upon the American experience” are detailed in an excerpt from a new history of Commentary, showing how early pieces in
BEA rolls out of town As BEA wrapped up last week, Carolyn Kellogg observed that at an Expo aglow with iPads, it was “telling that the hot trend for fall books is dystopian fiction.” Why is the dystopian novel experiencing a renaissance in Western literature after its absence for the past few decades? In an essay in Bookforum’s summer issue, Keith Gessen tracks dystopia from Orwell and Huxley to Tumblr and Facebook (including a saga that peaked on the web platform Plurk), writing that the Internet has “brought into being one of the fears common to most dystopian novels and developed with some
The march of Penguin: the publisher has finally reached an agreement with Amazon to get their books on the Kindle. As BEA ended yesterday, the Expo’s director announced that it will go back to a three-day format next year. That’s good news for international attendees, who find that two days just isn’t enough time, and good news for those fed up with the crammed main aisles, though there was one place to get away from the jostling crowds—the eerily quiet Digital Book Zone. At New York magazine’s Vulture blog, Boris Kachka detected a “dystopian mood of the attendees and the panels,” but the mood was lighter at Thursday’s breakfast hosted
The Javits Center, home of BooxExpo America, from Publishing Perspectives BEA Flickr collection Despite spotty Wi-Fi, anxiety about publishing’s future, and the appearance of an aged Rick Springfield, BEA was bustling on Wednesday. In the cavernous Javits center, galleys were distributed, deals were struck, catalogs thumbed through, and business cards swapped, with Wiley providing cups of free beer to help grease the wheels. The New York Times noticed a “certain frenzied feel,” about the conference, while GalleyCat made the rounds at the day’s book parties, affirming Harold Underdown’s much repeated tweet: “After two hours of pushing through the crowds at #bea10, I have reached a simple
“Some of us have wondered whether university presses were going to survive in the digital age,” writes Stan Katz in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “but most universities have not abandoned their presses.” Southern Methodist University Press suspended its operations, but others, such as Princeton University Press, are thriving. Inside Higher Ed’s Scott McLemee reports that while many university presses are at this year’s BookExpo, others are “rethinking how they approach the publishing industry’s biggest shindig,” noting that The University of California Press, Temple University Press, MIT Press, and The University of Chicago Press (among others) don’t have booths this year.
Sign of the times: a look at BEA banners from GalleyCat Exit Index: Total number of editors jettisoned from Harper’s in 2010: no less than 5. The magazine has announced the departure of two more top-of-the-masthead staff. GalleyCat prowled the halls of the Javits Center on Tuesday, wrapping up the day’s BookExpo events, while its companion blog eBookNewser detailed the conference’s digital news. The Constant Conversation sent this downbeat dispatch to booksellers: “we’re not asking you to save us; we’re asking you to save yourselves,” while Publisher’s Weekly reported from BEA’s DIY conference. At the LA Times Jacket Copy, Carolyn Kellogg summed up the morning’s contentious panel discussion about e-publishing this way: “The vicissitudes of
Greil Marcus kills scare quotes dead. BEA can blur past faster than a Kindle page-turn, leaving the bookish with the uneasy feeling that they’ve missed something, but now they can map the three day publishing maelstrom in advance with My BEA Show Planner. “We” would like to “inform” you that scare quotes are “frightening,” just “say” what you “mean.” Greil Marcus, who recently co-edited the exhaustive A New Literary History of America, found scare quotes—”a narrative disease”—scattered throughout the more than two-hundred essays in the collection, and sees them as “a matter of a writer protecting himself or herself.” When Marcus asked contributors if