Thanks to everyone who came out to the When I Was a Loser party last night, and especially to those who shushed the throng of investment bankers until they were shamed into relocating their networking/backrub party outside the reading zone. Kelly Braffet and Owen King dug out plaid shirts, concert tees, and baggy pants from high school, while I wore . . .
Lionel Shriver says she’s “one of those horribly unspontaneous writers who schemes everything ahead of time.”
On Brian Lehrer, Jonathan Rosen & Stephen Prothero discuss Jesus in Jewish culture in advance of Sunday’s What’s He Doing Here? festival.
Francisco Goldman recently acknowledged that potential converts to the work of Roberto Bolaño might be turned off by the media “hype assault.” Yet he argued, at a National Arts Club tribute to the late writer, that the praise being heaped on Bolaño originates not with newspaper editors moving in lockstep, nor with the publisher’s publicity department, but with readers themselves. . . .
A poetry professor of Indian extraction recycles old manuscripts at the college where he teaches, and becomes an object of suspicion. (Thanks, Max.)