Paper Cuts’ comments about 19th century boardinghouses and bedbug infestations, and — as people take in roommates to pay the bills and the scourge makes a comeback — the likely impending rise of both, called to mind John Cheever’s bedbug travails, as recounted in Blake Bailey’s Cheever: A Life. At the end of 1939, Cheever returned from a summer job . . .
The Hopkins Review plans to publish a previously unknown and somewhat unusual early Walker Percy story.
At NPR today I discuss Brad Gooch’s new biography of Flannery O’Connor, a good book that, increasingly, I sort of wish I hadn’t read. An excerpt: Reading about a favorite writer is risky. No matter how diligently the reader tries to compartmentalize, disappointing revelations threaten to infect the very books that inspired curiosity about the author in the first place. . . .
CUNY’s Graduate Center is accepting abstracts for a one-day conference devoted to David Foster Wallace’s work.
The 2009 Tournament of Books ends with a match between Toni Morrison’s A Mercy and Tom Piazza’s City of Refuge.