The Paris Review Daily

Author Archive

Burning Books, Listening to Just Kids, Casting Fleming

May 22, 2012 | by Sadie Stein

  • For those with Spotify, all the songs mentioned in Just Kids, in playlist form. (Perfect for a rainy day!)
  • Duncan Jones has signed on to direct a biopic of Ian Fleming, based on Andrew Lycett’s The Man Behind James Bond. Everyone knows the man himself okayed Sean Connery to play 007, but who should fill the enigmatic writer-spy’s shoes?
  • A letter from Edgar Allan Poe to Sarah Josepha Hale, author of the poem “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” has sold at auction for $164,000. In it, Poe refuses an offer to publish in Hale’s magazine, explaining, “To send you a crude or hastily written article would be injurious to me, and an insult to yourself—and I fear that I could, at present, do little more.”
  • William Peter Blatty, better known as the author of The Exorcist, is suing Georgetown University in church court, disputing his alma mater’s right to still call themselves Catholic given some of its secular policies.
  • “Frat boys burning textbooks to celebrate graduation burn down frat house.”

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    Cuckolds and Commutes: Happy Monday!

    May 21, 2012 | by Sadie Stein

  • This writers’ workshop is inspired by the 7-train commute.
  • Feel-good alert! A good samaritan bails out an endangered Vermont bookmobile.
  • One affair, two sides of the story: when both cuckold and cad give their versions, and, by the way, the latter is John le Carré.
  • The Marriage Plot, coming to a multiplex near you. (Okay, maybe not a multiplex.)
  • Jay McInerney: “I was fortunate to get a lot of mileage out of my vices.”

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    Auden, Furious and Peripatetic

    May 18, 2012 | by Sadie Stein

  • “In Defense of Brooklyn”—November 1946. Local jerky and artisanal bitters do not, however, figure in the argument.
  • When St. Marks in the Bowery changed its liturgy, Auden did not like it at all. His opener: “Have you gone stark raving mad?”
  • Speaking of Auden, his many New York addresses. Yes, all would now be very expensive.
  • President Obama claims to have never heard of 50 Shades of Grey. This inspires ambivalence.
  • Chicago celebrates the centenary of native son Studs Terkel (who actually died at ninety-six).
  • A camera that takes written pictures.
  • Newbery-winning children's author Jean Craighead George has died at ninety-two. An accomplished journalist and a nature lover, George was perhaps best known for her 1973 novel, Julie of the Wolves.

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    Crime, Punishment, and Chess

    May 17, 2012 | by Sadie Stein

  • The link between chess and writing.
  • An excised page of The Little Prince goes on the block.
  • Live out your fantasies in the penthouses that serve as the setting for Fifty Shades of Grey.
  • Speaking of fantasies … hot authors.
  • A Bay Area judge allows a prisoner to go free—provided he reads an hour a day and completes book reports.
  • Meanwhile, a white-collar criminal is ordered to write a book. (The author considered, and rejected, the opening line, “Call me a Schlemiel.”)

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    Remembering Rosset and Sexy Hoaxes

    May 16, 2012 | by Sadie Stein

  • In the Evergreen Review he founded, a moving tribute to Barney Rosset.
  • The best-read cities in America.
  • Cooking Cather.
  • Mike McGrady, perpetrator of sexy sixties literary hoaxes, has died. To quote the Los Angeles Times,“Inspired by popular best-sellers by the likes of Jacqueline Susann, McGrady challenged his newsroom buddies to write their own terrible, trashy, sex-filled best seller. McGrady and 24 other writers each took a chapter; in every badly written one, Penelope Ashe engaged in fantastical sexual exploits.” The rest is (sort of) history.
  • Odd couples, indeed: famous literary roommates!
  • Swamplandia! author Karen Russell wins the NYPL’s Young Lions Fiction Award.

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    Carlos Fuentes, 1928–2012

    May 15, 2012 | by Sadie Stein

    “When your life is half over, I think you have to see the face of death in order to start writing seriously. There are people who see the end quickly, like Rimbaud. When you start seeing it, you feel you have to rescue these things. Death is the great Maecenas, Death is the great angel of writing. You must write because you are not going to live any more.”

    —Carlos Fuentes, The Art of Fiction No. 68

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