September 14, 2011 Bulletin On the Shelf By Sadie Stein Portrait of Roald Dahl, 1954, by Carl Van Vechten. A cultural news roundup. William Sleator, a well-loved author of young-adult science fiction and fantasy, has died at sixty-six. “Of course, buzzwords come and go. But it’s striking that 9/11 and its aftereffects have left almost no traces in the language of everyday life.” Walk a mile in J. K. Rowling’s boots. “Rowling, who famously guards her privacy, is one of a number of prominent public figures expected to give evidence to Lord Justice Leveson’s judicial inquiry into phone hacking and media ethics and practices.” In response to the BBC’s plans to cut short fiction, prominent authors embark on a tweetathon. Not to be confused with the ambitious Sixty-Six Books Twitter project. Chinua Achebe vs. 50 Cent. A single Salinger sentence sells for $50,000. The Amazon digital-book library marches on. Happy ninety-fifth birthday, Roald Dahl. A birthday appeal to save the late author’s writing hut is controversial. The college experience, sans tuition. Remembering comics author Del Connell.
September 12, 2011 Bulletin Our New Café au Lait Cup in Action! By Sadie Stein The brand-spanking-new Paris Review café au lait cup has arrived in our offices, and we couldn’t wait to show it off. Needless to say, it’s the perfect companion to our fall issue, shortly available wherever fine books are sold.
September 7, 2011 Bulletin On the Shelf By Sadie Stein Mark Twain. A study finds that reading fiction may improve empathy. Carol Ann Duffy: “Poems are a form of texting.” Language fail. The Man-Booker shortlist is announced. Herewith, a cheat sheet. Philip Schultz: “[My tutor] worked with me to try to teach me how to read, without any success at all. And one day out of frustration asked me what I thought I was going to do in life if I couldn’t read. And surprising both of us, I said I wanted to be a writer. And he laughed.” Mark Twain’s charming love letter. On bookshelf aesthetics. Feral is having a moment. A new Wuthering Heights adaptation is “caked in grime and damp with saliva.” Oh, and “salted with profanity.” Ten years on, reading 9/11. Profanisaurus? There’s an app for that. George R. R. Martin, fanboy. Haunting images of America’s asylums.
September 6, 2011 Bulletin Talking Dirty with Our Fall Issue By Sadie Stein It avails not, neither earthquake nor hurricane nor suspended subway service— The Paris Review comes out on time. It’s a doozy, if we say so ourselves, and not to be missed. Subscribe now, or renew, and receive a limited-edition Paris Review café au lait cup. You can sip in style while you enjoy a full year of fiction, poetry, and prose. In the fall issue: Nicholson Baker discusses the pleasures of writing smut: Sexual arousal itself is a kind of drug. It has also turned out to be one of the few plots I can actually handle. If I imagine a man and a woman talking, and I know that later on they’re going to be taking some of their clothes off, that pulls me merrily along … The basic boy-meets-girl plot in which they talk a little bit and then they have some kind of slightly bizarre sex—that plot I can do. Other plots are harder. Terry Castle collects strangers’ children: So many children—most of them obnoxious-looking. It’s a fact: 99 percent of all photographs ever taken have little brats in them. Mugging, leering, pushing one another. Wielding fearsome Betsy Wetsy 147 dolls. Pouting in pajamas on the floor over unsatisfactory Christmas presents. Prancing egotistically. The sort of kids that Wittgenstein, back when he was a mean, half-demented schoolmaster in the Austrian Alps or wherever it was—long before Cambridge and the Tractatus—would have walloped upside the head and thrown in the snow. How is it, indeed, that I have so many of them? More, even, than Joyce Carol Oates has written novels. And not one, needless to say, did I get for free. Plus … Geoff Dyer on Tarkovsky. Lydia Davis on translating Flaubert. The Dennis Cooper interview. Fiction by Roberto Bolaño and newcomer Kerry Howley. Poems by Sharon Olds, Brenda Shaughnessy, Constantine P. Cavafy, Paul Muldoon, Jeff Dolven, Meghan O’Rourke, and Forrest Gander. Subscribe now!
August 31, 2011 Bulletin On the Shelf By Sadie Stein A cultural news roundup. Novelist and poet Susan Fromberg Schaeffer has died at seventy-one. Ruth Rendell speaks out on health cuts. Snape, the dark-horse winner of a Harry Potter popularity contest. This is controversial. What to read when you’re sick. P. G. Wodehouse: the movie. Javier Cercas: “I respect music too much—if I write I write, if I listen I listen.” Tweeting from beyond the grave? Samples of Obama’s summer reading. The most-wanted out-of-print title? Madonna’s Sex. The first Kashmir Book Festival has been canceled amid fears of violence. She Loves You: the Beatles and pronoun use. A. S. Byatt: “I am a profound pessimist both about life and about human relations and about politics and ecology. Humans are inadequate and stupid creatures who sooner or later make a mess, and those who are trying to do good do a lot more damage than those who are muddling along.”
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.