No doubt you’ve heard. The great Kurt Vonnegut is dead. 84 years old, brain injuries from a fall, and he’s gone. Twenty dollars says even — maybe especially — Dale Peck is mourning today. Perhaps, as he insists repeatedly in Timequake, things will be better when he’s dead; perhaps his followers will stop searching his books for some clue as . . .
Bookslut favorite Ander Monson reads tonight in Chicago. His “Outline Toward a Theory of the Mine Versus the Mind and the Harvard Outline” looks a lot like my (abandoned) novel outline.
Lore Segal emerges with more fiction every two decades, and James Marcus finds her latest, Shakespeare’s Kitchen, worth the wait. (Sample Segal here and here; hear her here.)
From the 3AM interview with Dan Rhodes: “Two hundred pages, that’s all you need. All books should be two hundred pages long. There’s no excuse for waffling.”
Chumley’s, the Greenwich Village speakeasy where Fitagerald and Steinbeck tied one on, is closed indefinitely after a wall collapsed last week.