Clever Bird

A Salon.com review of Lorrie Moore’s latest novel, A Gate at the Stairs, considers the drawbacks of being excessively witty.

09/02/09

Set to Disgrace and Disappoint

The Elegant Variation links to trailers for upcoming film adaptations of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, from which the novel’s central gay character is curiously omitted.

03/20/09

Elmo, Jon Stewart, Judy Blume to the rescue

Several major U.S. publishers have joined forces to combat the current instability of the industry. The result: a public service announcement in which a somewhat puzzling assortment of celebrities (John Lithgow?!) and authors convince us that books make great gifts.
12/13/08

Franzen and Ferris pick their faves

Keith Gessen, Sana Krasikov, and Nam Le are among the five promising writers under 35 chosen by previous National Book Award winners and finalists. (Oh, and since there's room, the other two are Matthew Eck and Fiona Maazel.) The new generation will be celebrated at a kick-off party for National Book Awards week in November.
09/27/08

Sizing up Kay Ryan

America’s new poet laureate Kay Ryan is assessed by Slate, and it looks like the Library of Congress is in for some serious assonance, heaps of internal rhyme, and some good ol' juxtaposition of unlike things.

07/30/08

Booker by Numbers

The Man Booker prize longlist was announced yesterday, and includes one heavyweight, five first-time novelists, and a post-9/11 novel about cricket. At least two predicted favourites were overlooked.


07/30/08

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.

06/17/08

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.

06/02/08

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.

04/28/08

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.

04/09/08

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.

02/11/08

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.

11/21/07

The 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.

09/05/07

Book 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.

08/09/07

Hemingway'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.
07/17/07

Naked Poems: Improvised Poetry Goes Virtual

Innovative technology developed for QuickMuse.com allows the web site's visitors to witness the creation of a poem in real time, keystroke by keystroke. The site pits two seasoned poets against each other, supplies them with scant inspiration, and then launches the playback fifteen minutes later. Think 'battling' but with Paul Muldoon instead of Eminem. Or don't.

05/31/06