Salman Rushdie believes that schoolchildren should learn poems by heart. But will this make kids hate poetry? The Guardian seeks out expert opinions.
Marcel Proust’s letters to his lovers, many of which have never been published, are being auctioned by his great grand-niece at Sotheby’s Paris.
Robert Marshall has won the Hazel Rowley Prize, which is awarded every two years by the Biographers International Organization to “the best proposal from a first-time biographer.” Marshall, the author of the novel A Separate Reality, is working on a biography of the controversial author Carlos Castaneda, who wrote The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (1968) and other best-selling books that drew on shamanistic teachings.
Career of Evil, the latest novel by Robert Dowling (aka J. K. Rowling), has been shortlisted for a crime-novel award.
An anonymous source told the New York Times that Gawker Media is currently embroiled in five defamation lawsuits. This does not include the $140 million invasion-of-privacy suit brought by Hulk Hogan. Meanwhile, Esquire editor and The Hunger of the Wolf author Stephen Marche says that although he has “been attacked pretty much my entire career by Gawker,” he believes “that Gawker serves an essential function in a celebrity-obsessed culture, and if it were to disappear the world would be poorer and the cause of journalistic truth would be damaged.”
“I’m interested in how ideas and even exact passages of text change when they’re lifted from one genre and placed in another—when they are read under the pressures of nonfiction’s truth claims or fiction’s aesthetic pressures.” Ben Lerner discusses his short story “The Polish Rider,” which appears in the Summer Fiction issue of the New Yorker.