Joseph Brodsky, with cat. The Chicago-based Poetry Foundation has appointed Robert Polito as its new president. Polito, currently the director of creative writing at the New School, is an accomplished editor (The Manny Farber Reader) and the author of many books, including the poetry collection Hollywood God and the Jim Thompson biography Savage Art, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Leanne Shapton, Sheila Heti, and Heidi Julavits have sold their book, Women in Clothes, which collects interviews, artwork, and essays by Miranda July, Zadie Smith, Rivka Galchen, Eileen Myles, and others. The book—which will “explore ideas about
W.G. Sebald Students who took W.G. Sebald’s final fiction class have compiled a list of the Austerlitz author’s “writing tips.” Due to a surplus of women, Housing Works is offering a discount to dudes who want to participate in their February 13th literary speed-dating event. We’re not normally interested in athletes’ personal essays, but after his breathtaking letter attacking a Maryland politician for homophobia, we’re very much looking forward to Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe’s forthcoming collection of “uncensored” writings. Given that the French find Fifty Shades of Gray sadly lacking in the sadomaschocism department, it’s no surprise that
Poet Richard Blanco Bookstores and libraries have started moving Lance Armstrong’s books to the fiction sections. Following a glowing profile of the lefty political magazine Jacobin in the New York Times Books section, Jezebel wonders why young political magazines run by women—such as the New Inquiry—are often relegated to the Styles section, while their male-run counterparts frequently get more serious coverage. New books used to fade into obsolescence by being ignored, but thanks to the power of Amazon, they can now be killed by “attack reviews.” Are the academic objections to Wikipedia as a non-trustworthy source on the decline?
Internet activist Aaron Swartz. The memorial service for internet activist and wunderkind programmer Aaron Swartz will take place this weekend in New York. Swartz took his own life last week after months of being aggressively targeted by federal prosecutors for downloading millions of JSTOR articles. (Which he never distributed.) More about the case is available here, and those unfamiliar with Swartz should check out remembrances by Cory Doctorow and Lawrence Lessig. We’re psyched about Apology, the new magazine by former Vice magazine editor Jesse Pearson. Inspired “in equal measure by the golden ages of The New Yorker and…by 1980s
Marie Calloway Tyrant Books—which has published work by Brian Evenson, Blake Butler, and Sam Michel, among others—had plans to release What Purpose Did I Serve in Your Life, by the much-discussed author Marie Calloway, in June. But this week, Tyrant publisher Giancarlo DiTrapano received bad news from his printer, Sterling Pierce: “Due to the content, we are going to have to pass on printing [Calloway’s] book.” Christopher Hitchens has only been dead for a little over a year, but he’s still going to be put on trial in a new book coming out in the UK this month. Richard
Melville House The National Book Foundation has announced several changes to the selection and awards process of the annual National Book Awards. There will now be both a long list of finalists announced in September, followed by a short list in October. Also, the judges on the selection committee will no longer be only writers, but will include booksellers, critics, and librarians. The French Embassy is looking into opening a French language bookstore in Manhattan. Melville House is hiring a managing editor. They’re asking for at least two years of book publishing experience and a willingness to “tolerate malarky.”
Poet and biographer Lisa Jarnot On Thursday in New York, translator Susan Bernofsky will give what promises to be a fascinating lecture on Robert Walser’s microscripts at Artists Space Books and Talks. After penning an essay titled “Why I Hate MFA Programs” five years ago, poet and Robert Duncan biographer Lisa Jarnot explains why she’s accepted a teaching position in Brooklyn College’s MFA program. Lawrence Wright’s much-anticipated Scientology expose is out this week, and the Los Angeles Times offers an early look at the book, and the religion’s fascination with the cult of celebrity. Condé Nast has unveiled new
George Saunders at Greenlight Books. From chowmeyow’s Flickr stream. Cory Doctorow has posted a moving tribute to Aaron Swartz, the deeply innovative tech activist and Baffler contributing editor who committed suicide on Friday. And the Huffington Post details the federal charges Swartz faced for hacking. With fans unable to get inside, George Saunders got the rock-star treatment at Brooklyn’s Greenlight Books last Thursday: “Though the event wasn’t slated to begin until 7:30, by 6:20, about 30 people had already gathered; by 6:40, staff members were encouraging fans to move to the back; by 10 after seven, the crowd had
Marcel Proust For the next two years, McDonald’s in Britain will give out children’s books with Happy Meals. The campaign is backed by the UK National Literacy Trust, and the chain expects to give out more than fifteen million fiction and non-fiction books by the end of 2015. On Thursday, Doubleday announced that it is releasing the Fifty Shades of Gray series in hardcover for the first time at the end of the month, giving the trilogy an even more peculiar publication trajectory in the US (going from e-books to paperbacks to hardcovers). The move is timed to coincide
Poet Richard Blanco Richard Blanco, a gay Latino poet of Cuban descent, has been selected to compose and deliver an original poem for Obama’s second swearing-in on the steps of the Capitol later this month. (Elizabeth Alexander was the president’s first inaugural poet.) In an interview with the New York Times, Blanco explains his affinity for the president: “Since the beginning of the campaign, I totally related to his life story and the way he speaks of his family, and of course his multicultural background. There has always been a spiritual connection in that sense. I feel in some
Imre Kertész Other than the Bad Sex Awards, our other favorite annual prize is the Hatchet Job of the Year award, which is given out by the England-based aggregation site The Omnivore. (Not to be confused with our own Omnivore). The award celebrates the most negative review of the year, and this year’s shortlist features Ron Charles on Martin Amis’s Lionel Asbo and Suzanne Moore on Naomi Wolf’s Vagina. We hope the award goes to Zoe Heller, who took aim at Salman Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton in The New York Review of Books. A sample: “Hindsight, alas, has had
Penguin’s new cover for George Orwell’s 1984. The Millions has unveiled their annual list of the year’s most anticipated books. In addition to books that we’ve already covered (the new George Saunders and Alejandro Zambra) we’re especially excited about the Renata Adler re-releases, Rachel Kushner, and Fiona Maazel’s forthcoming novels, and the Helen DeWitt novel that we hope will eventually be published. For other year-in-books previews, check out the Google Hangout conversation between Los Angeles Times critics David Ulin and Carolyn Kellogg. It’s the week of George Saunders. Today marks the release of his short story collection Tenth of
Master blurber (and documentary subject) Gary Shteyngart. There’s a copy of Rick Moody’s Purple America for sale on E-Bay, and it’s not just any old copy. “THIS BOOK WAS OWNED BY BERNIE MADOFF,” the seller boasts. The Penguin Press has announced its plans to publish Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, The Bleeding Edge. Publication date TBA. Meanwhile, rumors are swirling that the reclusive author “may be working” with director Paul Thomas Anderson on the director’s forthcoming film adaptation of Pynchon’s 2009 novel, Inherent Vice. At The Awl, Maud Newton looks to novelist Muriel Spark’s characters for advice for the coming
The Harry Ransom Center, on the University of Texas at Austin campus; one of the big buyers of writers’ papers. The New York Times profiles Uzoamaka (Max) Maduka, editor-in-chief of the newly launched American Reader, and living “proof that even in this iPhone age, some paper-based dreams have not died: bright young things, it seems, are still coming to New York, smoking too much and starting perfect-bound literary journals.” John Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, but according to newly declassified documents, he wasn’t anybody’s top choice: “There aren’t any obvious candidates for the Nobel prize,”
The Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle After being inspired by a trip across the U.S., Englishman Simon Goode is opening Britain’s very first centre for book arts. This June, Christian Wiman will leave his post as editor of Poetry magazine to teach at Yale. Wiman has spent the past ten years at Poetry, and during that time, he tripled circulation, and oversaw a complete redesign of the magazine. An especially ardent fan of the indie rock outfit The Mountain Goats has launched a campaign petitioning the government to name lead singer John Darnielle as the next U.S. Poet Laureate. “John
Adrienne Rich Eileen Myles’s Snowflake/Different Streets, Matvei Yankelevich’s Alpha Donut, Kevin Young’s Ardency: A Chronicle of the Armistead Rebels, and Joyelle McSweeney’s Percussion Grenade are among the poetry books singled out by John Yau and Bookforum editor Albert Mobilio as the best of 2012. For the New York Times Magazine’s annual “Lives They Lived” edition, Wild author Cheryl Strayed remembers poet Adrienne Rich: “the ferocity of her vision was matched only by the tenderness at its root. She might write about the private intricacies of two women talking or arguing or making love, but her grander intentions thrummed beneath
BBC1’s new PG Wodehouse adaptation, Blandings. The BBC is turning to P.G. Wodehouse to steal fans of Downton Abbey. This Spring will see the premiere of “A six-part BBC run of Blandings, based on Wodehouse’s much-loved accounts of the fictional life and times of Blanding Castle’s 9th earl. Set in 1929, with a starry cast, Blandings will follow the fortunes of the amiable, befuddled Emsworth, played by Timothy Spall, and his beloved pig, Empress.” If you’re not already familiar with Wodehouse, we recommend reading Ed Park’s review of his letters from our Dec/Jan issue. At Slate, Ron Rosenbaum considers
The latest stats from the Pew Research Center on American reading habits are out this week. According to the report, roughly three-quarters of Americans read at least one book last year, and the median number of books that most Americans read was six. Eighty-one percent of women read at least one book last year, while only seventy percent of men did. To celebrate the pre-sale of his first book, Bookforum columnist and Awl mastermind Choire Sicha reflects on the grim process of bookmaking: “There is something about the publication of a book that feels to me like the going
Lubeck’s Gunter Grass Haus Philip Roth biography Blake Bailey confirmed yesterday that a Twitter account purporting to belong to the Portnoy’s Complaint author is actually a hoax. “The real Philip Roth–yes, him–would have it known that he has NO twitter account, and it is MOST unlikely he ever shall,” Mr. Bailey tweeted. The account has been traced to Italian journalist Tommasso Debenedetti. The New York Times covers the literary history of Lübeck, Germany, a city with only 212,000 residents but a storied literary history. In addition to having a public library that’s nearly four hundred years old, Lübeck is