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.
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.”