January 11, 2013
Does Hannah Horvath, heroine of the HBO series “Girls,” stand to learn any lessons from Elizabeth Wurtzel’s January 6th New York magazine story “Elizabeth Wurtzel Confronts Her One-Night Stand of a Life”? It’s almost absurdly perfect that the article appeared just days before the start of “Girls”’s second season. You can imagine Hannah, the emotionally raw, often exhibitionist alter ego of the show’s creator, Lena Dunham, hunched over her iPhone, devouring the article bit by tiny bit before accosting her friends with a round of unanswerable, existential questions: “Is this me in twenty years? Will I have ‘failed to accumulate that brocade of civility and padlock of security … that makes life complete’? Will I be able to write about this for New York magazine? If so, where do I sign up?”
Wurtzel’s fifty-five-hundred-word essay is many things: a real-estate horror story, a jeremiad against aging, a list of reasons to go to law school, a list of reasons not to go to law school, a paean to the good old days of generous book and magazine writing contracts. It’s also self-aggrandizing, disjointed, and, in its most egregious moments, leaves the impression that her editors might have been egging her on—or worse, taking advantage of what sometimes looks like a fairly precarious psychological state—in order to ensure maximum blogospheric outrage. “For a while after my first book came out,” Wurtzel writes, “I went home with a different man every night and did heroin every day—which shows my good sense, because the rest of the time I was completely out of control.”
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January 11, 2013
Programmers at I.B.M. have to wash “Jeopardy!”-winning computer Watson’s motherboard out with soap after trying to teach it slang via Urban Dictionary.
“If you can get a clear picture of someone at college, you can get a clear picture of him at any stage of his life.” Robert Caro talks with Sarah Gordon about biographical writing.
“Are you able to switch from constructing a new universe to the job of choosing precise margin widths and weights of paper, ISBN numbers, and cover art?” The confessions of self-published author Dyanne Asimow.
From molten metal to stitched spines: a video from 1947 on how books are made.
“Out of the bedside drawer and up on the coffee table.” Boris Kachka on the rise of self-help books.
Can you identify these books by their covers?
January 10, 2013
One day last June, my girlfriend and I boarded a train at the Gare Saint-Lazare, in Paris, and rode it about fifty miles northwest to the city of Vernon, where we rented bicycles and pedalled another four miles to Giverny, the village where Claude Monet lived from 1883 until his death, in 1926. After Monet’s death, the house fell into disrepair, but, in 1977, funds were raised for an intensive restoration, and it opened to the public in 1980. Now some four hundred thousand people visit annually, between April and November, when the estate is open to the public. The house, the gardens, and the pond have been restored to something quite close to their original condition, albeit more visitor-friendly. I looked forward to seeing not just the place where Monet lived and worked but also the places described in Eva Figes’s novel “Light,” which is now entering its thirtieth year of existence.
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January 10, 2013
Richard Blanco has been selected as the poet for the Obama’s second inauguration.
McDonald’s announces a plan to replace toys with books in Happy Meals in England.
Geoffrey Nunberg’s notes from a conference on the history and study of note-taking.
The top ten phrases people use in their e-mails when they are engaging in corporate fraud.
A new Turkish law lifts the country’s ban on twenty-three thousand books.
Can you escape Michel Foucault? Find out by playing Oh No, a video game by Cameron Kunzelman.
January 9, 2013
Poetry is innately related to theft. The lyre was invented, the Greeks tell us, by Hermes, who then gave the instrument to Apollo as compensation for stealing cattle. One reason people’s aversion to poetry sometimes passes over into strong annoyance, or even resentment, is that poems steal our very language out from under us and return it malformed, misshapen, hardly recognizable. Poetry carries us to odd places, almost like the prank, allegedly popular a few years ago, in which somebody steals your garden gnome and sends you postcards of it from points spanning the globe—the Blarney Stone, the Pont-Neuf.
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January 9, 2013
A new study finds that, despite the growth of e-reading and digital technology, New Yorkers are spending more time than ever in the city’s libraries.
“Lovers of ink and paper, take heart. Reports of the death of the printed book may be exaggerated.” Nicholas Carr on why the e-book explosion might not last.
Matthew Yglesias wonders if independent bookstores will outlast Barnes & Noble.
In The Nation, J. Hoberman on the works of the journalist, film critic, and social scientist Siegfried Kracauer.
The finalists for The Omnivore’s second annual Hatchet Job of the Year Award.
The top ten cities for book lovers.
January 8, 2013
In November, 2012, the Nobel prize-winning novelist Imre Kertész announced his retirement. The writer, who as a fourteen year-old was transported to Auschwitz, has become one of Europe’s most eloquent and respected literary witnesses to the Holocaust. In books such as “Fateless” and “Kaddish for an Unborn Child,” he has made the paradoxical case that “the concentration camp is imaginable only and exclusively as literature, never as reality—not even—or rather least of all—when we have directly experienced it.” Since his working life has been devoted to this act of imagination, his decision to house his archive not in his native Hungary but, rather, in Germany appears to be a profound gesture of reconciliation. Yet, when I said so on Twitter, a Hungarian writer friend e-mailed to tell me that Kertész’s decision was also driven by more negative concerns:
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January 8, 2013
YOLO, omnishambles, and sideboob: a round-up of 2012’s most notable words.
“My stomach doesn’t know the difference between an original and a duplicate.” Sonia Faleiro on Mumbai’s thriving pirated-book market, and the street children who keep it running.
The Millions has released its list of the most anticipated books of 2013.
A number of rare illustrations, including a first edition of “Where the Wild Things Are” and an original sketch for the cover of “Little House on the Prairie,” go on auction this month at the Swann Galleries.
F. Scott Fitzgerald dressed in drag for a 1916 Princeton Triangle Club publicity photo.
An infographic of twenty-one emotions that don’t exist in the English language.
Charles Addams illustrates Mother Goose.
January 7, 2013
Nobody publishes a novel in order to meet other novelists, I’d like to think, but meet them you subsequently will. And some of them will become your friends.
You may eventually find yourself, as I did and do, teaching fiction writing, and some of your students will themselves write novels. More friends’ books—books arriving in the mail, or presented in person, with a photograph of a familiar face adorning the dust jacket. When you decide to write a novel—your first—the initial process may feel eccentric and exciting and individual. But it turns out you’re also entering a network.
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January 7, 2013
Penguin Press announced on Friday that Thomas Pynchon is set to publish a new book, entitled “Bleeding Edge.” (As reported in last week’s Book News, the notoriously secretive Pynchon is also rumored to be collaborating with Paul Thomas Anderson on a film adaptation of “Inherent Vice.”)
“You feel as if he understands humanity in a way that no one else quite does, and you’re comforted by it.” Joel Lovell’s moving New York Times Magazine profile of George Saunders, whose new collection of stories, “Tenth of December,” comes out tomorrow. (Here are some other titles to look out for this month.)
Tom Wolfe headlines the first digital-only issue of Newsweek with a “searing indictment of how the world of finance went wrong.”
At the Awl, Maud Newton looks to Muriel Sparks’s characters for dieting tips and other life advice.
A short documentary about the prolific book blurbing of Gary Shteyngart.
A catalogue of bookstore cats from across the country.
