Happy weekend
The lovely but deadly Emma Garman takes over tomorrow and the first Friday of every month.
If you need me, I’ll be drinking a beer somewhere in Brooklyn and pretending it’s a hot summer day and I’m fishing in a lake in the middle of some Miami suburbs that haven’t been built yet.
(“Suburban [...]
My name is Maud, and I am a (recovering) poststructuralist
At Crooked Timber, John Holbo announces his latest project:
I know this doesn’t sound healthy, but I’ve, I’ve … started a blog: a literary studies group blog. It’s called the Valve and it just got turned on.
Living the writing, and more
Tod Goldberg used the same author photo for his first two novels. While mulling over the photo possibilities for his third book, he’s “run across the very disturbing trend of authors trying to either look like their characters, or, worse, authors looking like strung out real estate agents.” He posts “a few notably bad [...]
Ramblings on the nouveau roman
Due to an unfortunate screen adapatation, Marguerite Duras‘ melancholy and breathtaking The Lover* may be the nouveau roman novel most often read by contemporary readers outside of France. At least I hope it is. (If a Hollywood butchering is what it takes, I guess I’m all for that?)
In my early twenties I also [...]
Poetry adds prose
When Poetry magazine received a gift of more than $100 million from Ruth Lilly in 2002, onlookers far and wide wondered how they’d spend it. The answer? Partly on prose. (Via Bookslut.)
Novels on the tenure track
Elaine Showalter, author of Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents, recently answered some questions that Joshua Glenn posed about contemporary academia. Asked why fiction professors “have grown more and more grotesque, and their departmental squabbles more petty” since the 60’s, Showalter responded:
In the early ’70s, the job market for new Ph.D.’s in literature [...]
Remainders: the “yes, I will put out my cigarette — on your face” edition
Like most of the bars in [expurgated] after 11:30 p.m., Kurt Vonnegut doesn’t give a damn about New York City’s smoking ban. Especially not when he just wants a smoke in a public park on a fine, sunny afternoon.
In the Telegraph, Mark Sanderson says: “The latest annual sales figures from Nielsen BookScan reveal why [...]
Ian McEwan’s continuing visa travails
Although the U.S. Department of Homeland Security offered Booker Prize winner Ian McEwan “a very fulsome apology” after denying him entry to the country last year, the author’s current visa “took nine months to obtain” and came through only hours before he was set to depart for a U.S. tour to promote his latest novel, [...]
Afternoon remainders
R.I.P. Robert Creeley.
Mary Cheney, daughter of the current Vice President, has sold the rights to her memoir for $1 million. Strange how the women of the Vice President’s family are all too happy to write about lesbian relationships for money, but don’t want to take a public stand on gay marriage.
David Foster Wallace declined [...]
Swink: unpublished writers’ prospects
On Monday, Mark Sarvas reported on the launch party for Swink magazine’s second issue, which includes stories from Sam Lipsyte, Neil LaBute and Carol Test, whose “Conversational English” won the magazine’s Literary Award in Fiction prize.
The issue’s “damaged darling” is a collaboration between Dan Chaon and Stacy Richter. And Michael A. FitzGerald [...]
Key West barkeep continues to pitch his establishment as God’s gift to drinkers because Hemingway got shitfaced there*
Sloppy Joe’s (“Hemingway’s favorite bar”) seeks an exemption from Florida’s ban on smoking in restaurants. The owner wants the state legislature to “redefine what it considers a ’stand-alone bar.’”
Related reading:
Bar brawls in the Conch Republic (and the outcome)
24-hour Hemingway house news outlet
* Look, I adore Hemingway and all, but where in Key [...]
Ms. editor-in-chief quits
Elaine Lafferty, the best thing to happen to Ms. magazine in years, has resigned.
The Observer reports on Lafferty’s tenure at the magazine:
When she started as editor in chief of Ms. in March 2003, “there was no inventory, no staff–it was like a startup, and they needed a summer issue,” said Ms. Lafferty. She [...]
First he takes Manhattan, then he takes — the Nobel?
During a panel discussion at Blue Metropolis, Montreal’s international literary festival, a prominent Canadian radio host will make the case that songwriter, poet and novelist Leonard Cohen should win the Nobel Prize in Literature. (Michael Schaub agrees, and I can think of far less deserving writers whose names have been put forward.)
In 2003, Canada [...]
Dude… he was magistrate
No, it’s not an outtake from Freaks and Geeks. (Some of us just lived it more than others.) This photo and several more are taken from Patrick Hughes’ 1984 Tarpon Springs High School yearbook.
Doomed adaptations
Stephen Galloway puzzles over doomed screen adaptations, starting with John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces — “now on indefinite hold” — and surveying a few other big-budget options that didn’t pan out. Among other things, he notes that “Warners owned rights to Donna Tartt’s 1992 novel The Secret History for years before Miramax [...]
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