Eat Your Heart Out, Nadine Gordimer
Voting for the Best of the Booker is well under way and if you’re still fretting over which candidate deserves your support you may want to consider this: only one of the nominees makes a cameo in
Scarlett Johansson’s latest music video. Watch for Rushdie after the three-minute mark.
17 Jun 2008 Walcott sics Mongoose on Naipaul
Nobel prize-winning poet Derek Walcott unleashed The Mongoose — an attack on his longtime literary rival VS Naipaul in verse, complete with caustic rhyming couplets — at the Calabash Literary Fesitval in Jamaica last week. Looks like the feud, throughout which the writers “discreetly sniped at one another in print and in interviews,” remains, at its core, quite lame.
But interesting, regardless.
02 Jun 2008 Houellebecq’s “old slut of a mother” Spits Back
Lucie Ceccaldi, 83-year-old mother of French poet and novelist Michel Houellebecq has written a book,
L’Innocent, in which Ceccaldi gives
her version of her life. It's being touted as a retaliation to Houellebecq’s not-so-thinly-veiled (and not-so-flattering) portrait of her in
The Elementary Particles. Read the
full article at The Guardian.
28 Apr 2008 Junot Diaz wins Pulitzer
The literary prize was awarded to Diaz, a Dominican from New Jersey for his highly anticipated first novel,
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, about a Dominican nerd from New Jersey. Read a recycled interview with the author on
Slate and Pulitzer cynicism
here.
09 Apr 2008 Zadie Takes Judging Seriously
In an address to readers of
The Willesden Herald, Zadie Smith explains that none of the hundreds of stories submitted to the web site’s annual short story competition are deserving of the $5000 prize. She stresses that the sole criterion of the contest is quality (see also: greatness), but future participants take note: “We also welcome all those whose literary sympathies lie with Rimbaud or Capote, with Irving Rosenthal or Proust, with Svevo or Trocchi, with Ballard or Bellow, Denis Cooper or Diderot, with Coetzee or Patricia Highsmith, with street punks or Elizabethans, with Southern Gothic or with Nordic Crime, with Brutalists or Realists, with the Lyrical or the Encyclopedic, in the ivory tower, or amongst the trash that catches in the gutter.” Next year should be a cinch.
11 Feb 2008 Norman Mailer’s Self-Penned Obituary
Mailer imagines his own funeral, attended by Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, Andy Warhol, and Gloria Steinem, in an issue of Boston Magazine from 1979. Read it
here.
21 Nov 2007The Smell of E-books
Nearly half of the college students polled by
CaféScribe, a web site that sells e-textbooks, cited smell as their favourite association with physical books. Survey results also show that the majority of students still prefer to buy used, rather than electronic textbooks, even though the latter are cheaper. The solution CaféScribe came up with, obviously, is to ply customers with scratch-and-sniff stickers that simulate a musty “old book” smell. Just for the hell of it, here’s a list of other smells that actually appeared in the survey (which, incidentally, did not evoke books): cut grass, freshly baked bread, cookies baking, sweat, mildew, and grease.
05 Sep 2007Ashbery So Hot Right Now
MTV has named Pulitzer Prize-winner John Ashbery its first ever poet laureate. Ashbery’s poetry will be broadcast to over 750 campuses in the U.S., in pithy promotional morsels designed to engage college students in a love of — or brief fling with — the less accessible art form.
Read more.
29 Aug 2007Book Clubs Hit the Beach
The New York Times reports on the growing popularity of “summer reading programs,” the book club’s collegiate cousin. Participants tend to focus on slim volumes of topical nonfiction, and readable, Oprah-sanctioned fiction — because nobody wants to read Finnegans Wake in July.
09 Aug 2007Hemingway's Cuban Home Endangered
U.S. sanctions against Cuba are jeopardizing the preservation of historic Finca Vigia, where Ernest Hemingway lived from 1939 to 1960. The Bush administration has blocked financial aid, leaving Hemingway’s fishing boat vulnerable to falling roof tiles and ignorant termites. Read the
Guardian article.
17 Jul 2007 
