August 24, 2011 Bulletin On the Shelf By Sadie Stein James Joyce by Alex Ehrenzweig, 1915. A cultural news roundup. New York poet Samuel Menashe has died at 85. James Salter wins the Rea Award for short fiction. Would Joyce have tweeted? One biographer thinks so. BookLamp: it’s like Pandora, for books. “Writing about sports the way that smart people talk about sports is a simple idea, and a good one.” E-books, now with sound tracks. “Now the fact that the president of the United States apparently doesn’t read women writers is not the greatest crisis facing the arts, much less the nation—but it’s upsetting nevertheless. As I suspect Obama would agree, matters of prejudice are never entirely minor, even when their manifestations may seem relatively benign.” Publishing is experiencing an upswing. But are there too many books being published already? The Berlin library will return books confiscated during the Third Reich—including a Communist Manifesto that may have belonged to Friedrich Engels. Google celebrates Borges. Being immortalized by Julia Roberts isn’t enough to save one London bookshop.
August 23, 2011 Bulletin James Salter Wins the 2010 Rea Award By The Paris Review Photograph by Lan Rys. James Salter, winner of The Paris Review’s 2011 Hadada Prize, has been given the 2010 Rea Award for the Short Story, a lifetime-achievement prize bestowed annually on “a living American or Canadian writer whose published work has made a significant contribution in the discipline of the short story as an art form.” This year ’s jurors praised Salter as “the most stylish and grave and exact of writers.” Past winners of the prize include Grace Paley, Cynthia Ozick, Tobias Wolff, Alice Munro, and John Updike. To read more, see our complete coverage of James Salter month.
August 17, 2011 Bulletin On the Shelf By Sadie Stein A cultural news roundup. Just Kids gets the big-screen treatment. So does Tolkien. Kathryn Stockett triumphs in court (as well as at the movies). Need an alternative to The Help? Try Welty. “As a kid I would get my parents to drop me off at my local library on their way to work during the summer holidays and I would walk home at night. For several years I read the children’s library until I finished the children’s library. Then I moved into the adult library and slowly worked my way through them. With the kids’ library I did it alphabetically but I discovered I couldn’t do that with the adult one because there were too many big boring books to read, so I did it by interesting covers.” A tribute to Wendy Wasserstein. Amazon moves in on publishing with first “major” deal. The next best thing to a vacation? Reading about a vacation. The movies may be complete, and the books long finished, but Harry Potter fans need not despair: Pottermore launches in October. The case for spoilers! Who’s your favorite deliciously awful fictional character? Bookstores clear a “Rick Perry” section. “Ah ha! I’ve finally put my finger on a concrete reason for my lingering, irrational, doubtless soon-to-be-jettisoned prejudice against e-readers.”
August 10, 2011 Bulletin On the Shelf By Sadie Stein A cultural news roundup. Philip Levine is America’s new poet laureate. Save the Words is dedicated to bringing underutilized vocabulary back into circulation. A locupletative goal! The Popeye Cookbook is, not shockingly, heavy on the spinach. Bienvenue en France, Google Books! An unlikely hit: The Waste Land app earns back its costs in a mere six weeks. “I think it’s one of those things where you’re standing in a room, and you’re like, ‘Let’s make a new food magazine.’ And that’s a terrible idea. The world does not need a new food magazine … But if it’s such a bad idea that you can do a good version of it, then that’s a cool challenge.” An Edinburgh marathon reading of Theresa Breslin’s Prisoner in Alcatraz attempts to break the world reading record. Signs of a publishing rebound? John Burnside on researching a book: “I went for a walk in the Arctic Circle without map or compass. Fortunately, I was only lost for hours, not days.” Watch Britten’s Turn of the Screw, live. “There was something a bit Wellsian about photographs of riots and looting across London this weekend. Pictures of burning shops and broken windows and young men confronting uniformed police included crowdsourced images snatched by witnesses in the rapid, unexpected diffusion of trouble. The most dramatic, of Tottenham on fire and the blackened aftermath, are positively apocalyptic. To me, it all seems uncanny and reminiscent of late Victorian science fiction. Even the place names have that quality of ordinariness that Wells exploits in his fantasy of a London apocalypse: Tottenham in flames, insurrection in Enfield, anarchy in Leyton and Islington …”
August 3, 2011 Bulletin On the Shelf By Sadie Stein A cultural news roundup. Facebook has acquired Push Pop Press, a start-up that converts books into iPad- and iPhone-friendly formats. “Until a few years ago, hardly a day would go by in the summer without the mailman bringing a postcard from a vacationing friend or acquaintance. Nowadays, you’re bound to get an email enclosing a photograph, or, if your grandchildren are the ones doing the traveling, a brief message telling you that their flight has been delayed or that they have arrived.” Vote for the top one hundred science-fiction and fantasy titles. Anyone for retro cocktails? Joanna Lumley is raising funds to convert the home that helped inspire Peter Pan into a children’s literature center. In praise of small-town papers. Remembering Elizabeth Mackintosh—aka Josephine Tey, aka Gordon Daviot. Meet the new Spider-Man: Brooklynite Miles Morales. The New Yorker conquers the iPad. A guide to literary Edinburgh. #undatable—the literary characters you really wouldn’t want to date. Please judge these Virago Modern Classics by their gorgeous covers!
July 29, 2011 Bulletin The Beach Towel: Now for Sale! By The Paris Review We’ve heeded your wishes and, by popular demand, our super-duper Leanne Shapton–illustrated Paris Review beach towel is now available for purchase, yours for a very reasonable $20. But wait! For only $20 more, you can add a full year of fiction and poetry. That’s right: with the price of a subscription, the towel can be yours, free. The smartest towel of summer and reading material to match? That’s what we call a deal.