April 13, 2012 On the Shelf Jack London Advises; Baboons “Read” By Sadie Stein Slate weighs in on the e-book case: “The DoJ’s action effectively robs publishers of the ability to price their own products and robs other retailers of any hope of competing effectively with Amazon. Hence the DoJ has all but guaranteed a future in which readers end up with fewer well-edited books—both physical and electronic—and in which writers feel less free to speak against concentrated power.” Here is an igloo made of books. Baboons reading … remedially. We have a title: J. K. Rowling’s adult debut will be titled The Casual Vacancy. Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul Museum of Innocence (which started as a novel) opens later this month. The challenge of culling books. Jack London did not sugarcoat it for a young writer. David Sedaris: “Throughout my 20s and early 30s—my two-books-per-week years—I did most of my reading at the International House of Pancakes.”
April 12, 2012 On the Shelf The Smell of Books; the Power of ‘Wuthering Heights’ By Sadie Stein The Department of Justice is suing several large publishers, plus Apple, for alleged price collusion on e-books. How not to squander a book advance: a primer from Emily Gould. (Hint: leather vests don’t count as investments, whatever the lady at the shop may say.) Meanwhile at the Awl: how not to ruin a book tour. Servicey! Wuthering Heights … home of wind turbines? Concerns over wind farms in Brontë country. While rhapsodizing about the “smell of books” is something of a personal peeve, this video, in which University College London chemists analyze the distinctive perfume, is interesting. Apparently, the bouquet is “a combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness.” Welcome to the Storyverse. Günter Grass speaks out on his ban from Israel.
April 11, 2012 On the Shelf Happy Birthday, Gatsby; Good-bye, Britannica By Sadie Stein The eighth installment of Kramers Ergot moves toward (cerebral) genre. Rule Britannia: An appreciation of the legendary eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. This Rizzoli boutique is far more lovely than one would expect a department-store bookstore to be. What are the most frequently shoplifted books? Crowdsourcing the answer! Guess who “enjoys working with Amazon”? Robert Gottlieb, that’s who. On the “Dark Lady of American Letters”: Margaret Fuller was a divisive figure due to “the effect of her manners, which expressed an overweening sense of power, and slight esteem of others … The men thought she carried too many guns, and the women did not like one who despised them.” Bookish weddings. Happy belated birthday, Great Gatsby.
April 10, 2012 On the Shelf Scandals, Contests, and Noms de Guerre By Sadie Stein RIP Christine Brooke-Rose, an experimental novelist who has died at eighty-nine. Quoth the New York Times, she had “the ardor of a philologist, the fingers of a prestidigitator and the appetite of a lexivore, resulting in novels that exhilarated many critics and enervated others.” The ALA’s list of 2011’s most-challenged books includes To Kill a Mockingbird, The Hunger Games, and My Mom’s Having a Baby! A Kid’s Month-by-Month Guide to Pregnancy, by Dori Hillestad Butler. Amazing movie-title stills. England’s poet laureate takes on the Pendle Witches. “This was a grisly affair, even by the debased standards of the day, with two of the women hanged at Lancaster castle aged over eighty and blind, another probably driven mad by a disfigured face with one eye lower than the other, and all ten convicted largely on the evidence of a nine-year-old child.” You surely know O. Henry’s real name, and the pen names of the Brontes … but there are some real surprises on this list of authorial noms de guerre! At the New York Public Library, Thoreau goes digital. Ninety-six-year-old Herman Wouk’s latest novel, The Lawgiver, chronicles the making of a movie about Moses via “letters, memos, emails, journals, news articles, recorded talk, tweets, Skype transcripts, and text messages.” A literary tattoo showdown. The Man from U.N.C.L.E. contest rewards the winner, appropriately, with classic pulp.
April 9, 2012 On the Shelf Smokable Songbooks, Controversial Vodka By Sadie Stein Lindsay Gibbs’s Titanic: The Tennis Story recounts how tennis players and Titanic passengers Dick Williams and Karl Behr met on a rescue ship and went on to become Davis Cup partners—as historical fiction. Unfortunately, the subjects’ descendants aren’t thrilled about the novel, particularly by the fact that the launch party will be sponsored by Iceberg Vodka. The words in poor taste were bandied. Snoop Dogg has released a smokable book. That is all. “The first time I went to [the British National Science Fiction Convention], all I could see was a sea of white, male faces … I found it very disheartening, and I knew I could either go away and never go to another con or try to do something about it.” After writing a poem critical of Israel, Günter Grass has been banned by that country’s Interior Minister. In honor of the Mets’ fiftieth, you can get e-versions of Jimmy Breslin’s Queens-centric classics. In honor of the Mets’ sweep, you can read The Paris Review interview with die-hard Mets fan P. G. Wodehouse. Cartoonist Christoph Niemann draws the books on his nightstand.
April 4, 2012 On the Shelf Walk Like Updike, Live Like Lowell, Eat Your Words By Sadie Stein A cultural news roundup. RIP illustrator John Griffiths. A slideshow of his Penguin covers. Speaking of covers, Meg Wolitzer asks whether male authors garner better ones. The best spokesman for an Ernest Hemingway novel? Papa himself. The world’s first edible cookbook is printed on sheets of fresh pasta, blueprints for its own destruction that, when baked, turn into a lasagna. Perhaps not shockingly, members of Russia’s Public Chamber have criticized a school notebook, part of the Great Russians series, the cover of which features an image of Stalin in military regalia. The publishers, defiant, point out that in a recent TV contest, Stalin placed third in a vote on the country’s “greatest historical figures.” The Awl’s number-one tip for writing the Great American Novel? “Move out of Brooklyn.” The big news in Salt Lake City was not that yours truly was there (although I was): luminaries of the horror genre converged on the Beehive State for the 2012 Bram Stoker Awards, where writers Joe McKinney and Allyson Byrd won big. In which Ian McEwan helps his son with an essay on one of his own novels … and gets “a very low mark.” Sylvia Plath slept here (and take a peek into fourteen other writers’ bedrooms). Robert Lowell wrote here—on Manhattan’s West Sixty-seventh Street—and it can be yours for $685,000. The Little House books are canonical—literally. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s autobiographical series join the Library of America. John Updike predicted New York’s newly announced 6 1/2 Avenue in a 1956 New Yorker article: “As a service to readers who are too frail or shy for good-natured hurly-burly, we decided to plot a course from the Empire State Building to Rockefeller Center that would involve no contact with either Fifth or Sixth Avenue.”