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 . . .
I’ve said it before, but I can’t stress it enough: Rupert Thomson writes nightmares. He takes all the things humans dread and want the most, shuffles them together like so many cards, and deals them out on the page in some of the most straightforward but stylistically beautiful prose you’ll come across. What’s more, he knows how to keep a . . .
As if the Valerie Plame affair weren’t bad enough, in what may be retaliation for his forthcoming book critical of the Bush administration’s post-9/11 military “strategies,” a journalist has been falsely accused in a forged but seemingly official Defense Intelligence Agency cable of spying for Saddam Hussein. (Via Moby Lives.) Ricky Gervais of The Office claims to have read only . . .