In its most recent quarterly report, the New York Times announced that it now has 1.4 million digital-only subscribers. The paper has gained 67,000 digital subscribers since the beginning of 2016.
We were deeply entertained by the breadth of the index of cultural critic Chuck Klosterman’s forthcoming book, What If We’re Wrong: Thinking About the Present as if It Were the Past, which will be published in June. Skimming the A and B entries, we found: ABBA, AC/DC, Renata Adler, Aristotle, Jane Austen, Ballers, Baudrillard, the Bee Gees, blogging, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Budweiser.
TOR Publishing has announced that consulting editor Ann VanderMeer has acquired a new novella, titled The Warren, by the prolific and stylish horror writer Brian Evenson.
After Jessa Crispin announced her plans to discontinue her web zine Bookslut, she granted an interview to New York magazine, telling them that her feelings about the publishing industry are far from enthusiastic. She explains her decision to stop Bookslut: “Part of the reason why I disengaged from it is I just don’t find American literature interesting. I find MFA culture terrible. Everyone is super-cheerful because they’re trying to sell you something, and I find it really repulsive. There seems to be less and less underground. And what it’s replaced by is this very professional, shiny, happy plastic version of literature.” She’s not a fan of much online books coverage, either, because, she claims, it has essentially mimicked the mainstream. “It’s just taking the print template and moving it online. I see the Millions used on book blurbs now. They’re so professional, and I mean that as an insult.”
Adam Haslett, the author of the recent novel Imagine Me Gone, notes in a new essay that a psychiatrist once told him that “psychosis is a fixed belief in an imaginary world lasting months or years, which no one but the patient himself is able to perceive.” The psychiatrist then “wondered if this wasn’t also a decent definition of a novelist.”
On Thursday and Friday this week, the CUNY Graduate Center will host an interdisciplinary conference on translation and critical theory.