Mark E. Smith A university exhibit and new book highlight David Foster Wallace’s life and work, and Scott McLemee visits the relics: “A writer who kills himself runs the risk—and he must have known this—of having his life and work turned into one long suicide note.” Scholar Tariq Ramadan returns to the U.S. for the first time since he was barred from the country by the Bush Administration in 2004. He chats with author Ian Buruma, Slate editor Jacob Weisberg, and war reporter George Packer tonight at Cooper Union’s “Secularism, Islam, and Democracy: Muslims in Europe and the West.”
Hilary Mantel Starting today, the New Republic is walling off its print content, creating the “TNR Society,” a place where connoisseurs can imbibe the magazine’s “premium content,” and enjoy “other new perks, like insider newsletters, articles, and invitations to high-profile events.” As for the clubby vibe, TNR has never prided itself on being overly friendly; as editor Leon Wieseltier said after James Wood left for the New Yorker, “David [Remnick] believes that civility is a primary intellectual virtue. I believe it’s a secondary intellectual virtue, or no intellectual virtue at all.” Over at the Morning News, the Tournament of
William Bowers Say it ain’t so, Tommaso! The New Yorker’s Judith Thurman has uncovered more fraud by Italian journalist Tommaso Debenedetti, who fabricated interviews with Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, E. L. Doctorow, and a growing list of top flight authors. Debenedetti isn’t yet admitting any wrongdoing, saying he’s “shocked and saddened” that his subjects deny their Obama-bashing chats. Jack Estes, who runs Pleasure Boat press, proclaims that publishing is alive and well. Just don’t expect to sell more than four hundred copies, or make a profit: “If you are writing to be published, if that’s your goal, you’re probably
George Saunders Carla Blumenkranz has irrevocably shattered our illusion that book publishing is a humane, just, and kind industry. Blumenkranz offers a cutting portrait of publishing-house grunt work: “She showed me how to read manuscripts she didn’t want from agents—by shuffling the pages until they looked like they’d been read,” Blumenkranz writes of one editor, who also taught her “how to respond to unsolicited work—’Sorry to say that Trouble in Venice just didn’t speak to me the way I’d hoped it would.'” The Daily Beast inaugurates its “Writers to Watch” series, with the first installment’s author going gaga for
Dial-A-Poet John Giorno Celebrate National Poetry Month by dialing up Ubuweb’s digitized version of Giorno Poetry Systems Dial-A-Poem Poets. It is well worth the dime. You might think that higher e-book prices would benefit writers, but if you do the math, you find that publishers collect the extra dough. Does a writer’s life get any better than a cushy Cullman Center fellowship? An ornate office at the 42nd Street library, a $60,000 stipend, access to the library’s vast research collection (presumably unhampered by the NYPL’s Kafkaesque bureaucracy), and the right to call yourself a Scholar (with a capital “S”).
Joshua Cohen Stephen King isn’t the only writer with a baseball novel on deck: Chad Harbach, who contributes articles to n+1, has sold his first novel, tentatively titled The Art of Fielding, to Little, Brown for $650,000. “The M.F.A. is a degree in servitude,” Joshua Cohen tells the New York Observer. “It is a way to keep writing safe.” In a lively profile of Cohen, the Observer compares the author’s forthcoming Witz, a novel about the hunt for the last living Jew, to Infinite Jest and Gravity’s Rainbow. The cover image for Jonathan Franzen’s long-awaited September novel, Freedom, has
David Mamet If you can weather a blizzard of ALL CAPS WRITING, David Mamet’s recently leaked memo to the writers of the TV show The Unit has some wise writing advice. Our two cents? Good prose begins when you release the caps-lock key. Glen Beck’s new novel, The Overton Window, is coming out this summer. Beck, a newsman known for his measured tone and fair and balanced reporting, supposedly loosens his tie a little in his fiction. We can’t wait to see the fiery emotion roiling underneath his placid surface. Sorry, print, reports of your death have turned out
Philip Pullman The Austrian author Stefan Zweig, a friend of Freud, and once the most translated author in the world, has gained a lot of stateside popularity after a 2006 appreciation by Joan Acocella. Then, the backlash began, initiated by a devastating, and convincing, critique by Michael Hofmann, who wrote that Zweig’s literary output was “just putrid.” So we wonder, along with The Guardian’s Nicholas Lezard, is there’s still “a place for Stefan?” Canongate Books’s iPhone app for Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ will feature videos of the author, allow you to to email
Virginie Despentes As James Shapiro’s new book argues that Shakespeare really did write all that great work, Oxford University Press has announced a new complete, modernized edition of the Bard’s work, set for publication in 2016. Oxford’s scholars will “make careful use of all the surviving original documents,” and offer readers alternate versions, a choice of modern or original spelling, and both print and digital editions. The winner of the annual Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title has been announced. Virginie Despentes, author of King Kong Theory, wonders why Hollywood spends millions on slickly rendered violence, while pornography is
Marlon James The Morning News Tournament of Books has us on the edge of our seats. Wednesday’s competition—between the formidable novelists Hillary Mantel and Nicholson Baker—was a thrill (Mantel’s Wolf Hall won by a nose). On Thursday, Marlon James edged out Victor Lavalle. And soon, we’ll get to know the literary taste of motivational speaker and party rocker Andrew W.K. Place your bets now: the winner will be announced on April 5. Referring to e-books, The Village Voice proclaimed, “OK, here comes the flood.” In 2000. Though best-known as a writer of high-minded YA fiction, Philip Pullman is also
Mary Gaitskill Pomona College is trying to fill David Foster Wallace’s former teaching position. The top candidates—Chris Abani, Edie Meidav, and Jonathan Lethem—have infinitely large expectations to live up to. But out your PJs: Tonight, Bookforum contributor Wayne Koestenbaum and Jeff Dolven discuss the “poetics of sleep” from bunk beds. From an interview with Mary Gaitskill, in which she talks about literary film adaptations, the JT Leroy controversy, and Nabokov’s The Original of Laura: “it’s a travesty to have published it. Nabokov was a perfectionist. I don’t even want to read it, frankly.” (At the American Scholar, Brian Boyd
Emily Gould Emily Gould’s Tumblr page is mainly devoted to cute kitties, but also contains what she swears is her last response to a book review, ever; a rebuke of Ana Marie Cox’s review of Gould’s forthcoming memoir And the Heart Says Whatever. Does your favorite periodical pass the “droop test”? Former Soft Skull Press boss and publishing guru Richard Nash’s vision of the e-book future: Big publishers will disappear, but “long-form text-only narrative will continue to thrive.” OR Books has rejected Amazon’s distribution offer. According to OR’s Colin Robinson, “We can do a better job finding customers ourselves.”