At the dentist (yes, again) yesterday, I picked up the latest issue of New York magazine and was delighted to find Keith Gessen’s excellent and highly critical review of Ian McEwan’s latest novel, Saturday, which I’m currently reading. The New York Sun interviews new Paris Review editor and New Yorker writer Philip Gourevitch, who says, “I’m not planning to make . . .
The proprietress of Tingle Alley takes note of the rise in book titles suggesting that the author was “dragged kicking and screaming into print.” Among them are Kirstie Alley’s How To Lose Your Ass and Regain Your Life: Reluctant Confessions of a Big-Butted Star and Richard M. Cohen’s Blindsided: Lifting a Life Above Illness. “Wouldn’t it be fabulous,” Caaf says: . . .
Nick Kocz, a regular email correspondent, sends in this report from Jonathan Safran Foer’s “reading at a packed Barnes & Noble in Charlottesville Saturday as part of the Virginia Festival of the Book.” Before the Foer reading, Kocz attended an event held by former Poetry magazine editor Joseph Parisi, and he weaves in some reflections on that event, too. . . .
Last week Ayelet Waldman, Bad Mother blogger and wife of Michael Chabon, started a new column at Salon. In her first piece, she revealed that her husband discovered only by reading her blog that she was, at one low point, contemplating suicide. She said her seven-year-old son had heard her discussing the same suicidal post with her friend and wept . . .
Jackie Corley has drawn my attention to Nerve.com’s new Henry Miller Award, established in honor of the 20th Century writer who made his name with frank portrayals of sex in books like Tropic of Cancer. Each month Nerve’s readers will decide between five passages, pre-selected by staffers from recently released books, that present “honest literary sex scenes capable of ‘resuscitating . . .