July 27, 2011 Bulletin On the Shelf By Sadie Stein A cultural news roundup. Just where are Cervantes’s bones? Maurice Sendak’s new book, Bumble-Ardy. Is this the worst sentence of the year? The Man Booker Prize longlist is announced; it’s eclectic! The shortlist comes out in September. Let’s not forget the Not Booker Prize. This artist fought George Lucas, and won. “Award-winning science-fiction writer Alastair Reynolds is to delve into the past of Doctor Who in a new novel that sees the Time Lord in his Jon Pertwee incarnation taking on the Master.” And that’s not all: “new” Mickey Spillanes! After twelve years, Whit Stillman has a new film. Damsels in Distress, starring Greta Gerwig, will close the Venice Film Festival. “In an industry that has been upended by the growth of e-books, publishers are moving against convention by pushing paperbacks into publication earlier than usual, sometimes less than six months after they appeared in hardcover.” Grace Coddington sells her memoir for seven figures to Random House. Moist and other repulsive words.
July 20, 2011 Bulletin On the Shelf By Sadie Stein Jane Austen A cultural news roundup. An unfinished Jane Austen novel sells at auction for $1.6 million. The end of Borders. “Sigmund Freud, cokehead.” California schoolbooks add the LGBT community. So do Archie comics. The rock memoir is huge: can the Thin White Duke (or for that matter Ziggy Stardust) be far behind? Bowie becomes publishers’ “top target.” “We insist that students touch and smell and shine light through items, and investigate them to understand the book in history, and understand the book as history.” Entering the publishing world in the digital age. Longshot Magazine is back. A Harry Potter plagiarism case bites the dust. Frederick Seidel on a time before air-conditioning. A brief history of Pendleton. Alan Bennett: “I have always been happy in libraries, though without ever being entirely at ease there.” How to undress a Victorian lady. If the Paradise Lost adaptation is hell for Milton lovers, call Bradley Cooper the devil. The NewsCorp scandal: (almost) stranger than fiction.
July 13, 2011 Bulletin On the Shelf By Sadie Stein A cultural news roundup. Theodore Roszak, a chronicler of the 1960s who coined the term counterculture, died this week at 77. Hugh Grant for Prime Minister. Zimbabwean author NoViolet Bulawayo has won the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing for her short story “Hitting Budapest.” Penelope Lively calls Kindle readers “bloodless nerds.” In the spirit of “misery loves company,” the Web site My Unfinished Novels encourages frustrated writers to “share your creative failures.” Science fiction and religion. Harry Potter and religion. Miami artist Agustina Woodgate calls herself a “poetry bomber”: she sews tiny bits of poetry into garments in area thrift stores. “Sewing poems in clothes is a way of bringing poetry to everyday life just by displacing it, by removing it from a paper to integrate it and fuse it with our lives. Sometimes little details are stronger when they are separated from where they are expected to be,” she says. A brief history of title design. Reading retreats: book lovers’ dream vacations. Bill Keller is tired of his reporters who want to write books. Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca gets the Broadway treatment, for good or ill.
July 6, 2011 Bulletin On the Shelf By Sadie Stein Photograph by Michael Stravato.A cultural news roundup. Artist Cy Twombly died this week at eighty-three. Newly revealed letters point to the existence of unpublished Salinger manuscripts. People do, in fact, give a damn about an Oxford comma. The best party game of all time gets its due. “Hemingway’s remains one of the iconic American deaths. He has come close to being remembered as much for his death as for his work, a terrible fate for a writer.” Penguin launches an app. For the first time, documents from the Vatican’s secret archives will go on view. Hang onto those proofs! When they’re good, they’re very, very good: the Mobys celebrate the best and worst in book trailers. “You should not have idle hands, you should always be working. All your life.” And other words of wisdom from Chekhov. No rabbits were harmed in the making of As You Like It.
June 27, 2011 Bulletin Plimpton! on Kickstarter By Thessaly La Force For over the last year, Thomas Bean and Luke Polling have been working on a documentary about George Plimpton called, well, Plimpton!. Today they launched a Kickstarter project to help them cover the expensive costs of paying for archival footage. Watch the video above to see a short clip of the film, which combines Plimpton’s own narration with interviews from his family and friends such as Peter Matthiessen, Gay Talese, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Mike Milbury, Elaine Kaufman, Robert Silvers, James Lipton, Jay McInerney, and Hugh Hefner. If you donate $100 or more to the film, you’ll receive a Paris Review subscription along with a DVD of the film and other goodies. We can’t wait to see the finished project!
June 22, 2011 Bulletin On the Shelf By Sadie Stein A cultural news roundup. A. Whitney Ellsworth, the first publisher of The New York Review of Books, has died at seventy-five. Even Kate Middleton’s spelling is under scrutiny. Andrea Levy’s The Long Song has won the Walter Scott prize for historical fiction. Whoa. Keanu Reeves writes poetry. Pottermore mania! Celebrate Independent Bookseller’s Week. The Hobbit movie will contain an elf character not found in the original book, to be played by Evangeline Lilly. The first self-published author to sell a million e-books is one John Locke (not to be confused with the philosopher). Says Jim Shepard of his ominously named story collection You Think That’s Bad: “It does seem to embody some of the characters’ worldviews … [It’s like saying,] ‘Wait until you see what’s coming.’” In order to compete against online retailers, independent bookstores may have to start charging for their events. Ann Patchett is concerned: “I wouldn’t want the people who have no idea who I am and have nothing else to do on a Wednesday night shut out. Those are your readers.” Who will win the Greenaway Medal? Meet the greatest baseball game ever played.