April 2, 2013 On the Shelf The Bookstore of the Year, and Other News By Sadie Stein Oxford, Mississippi’s amazing Square Books has been named the PW Bookstore of the Year. All the book industry April Fool’s Day pranks—from a 52 Shades imprint to the Big Six becoming a Big One—seem depressingly plausible. Buck up! Here are seven pranks and tricks from literature. You can take a cruise with Margaret Atwood. The novel she’s promoting, MaddAddam, is a dystopian tale described as “unpredictable, chilling and hilarious,” all words we like applied to our cruises, too. BuzzFeed is launching a long-form reads section, which the editor characterizes as “BuzzFeed for people who are afraid of BuzzFeed.” We imagine the fearless are also welcome.
April 1, 2013 Bulletin Marie Chaix and Harry Mathews at La Maison Française By Sadie Stein Here’s one we won’t be missing: tomorrow evening, at 7:30 P.M., join Marie Chaix and Harry Mathews as they discuss writing, translation, and collaboration at NYU’s Maison Française. Read more about their story here!
April 1, 2013 First Person On the Occasion of the Removal of My Girlfriend’s Dog’s Balls By Simon Akam Nine weeks ago, a frigid, low-pressure system deposited some six inches of snow on central Belgium. On a Tuesday evening my girlfriend returned from work to her parents’ house outside Brussels and attempted the construction of a snowman in the garden. The process was unsuccessful; it was very cold and the snow was dry powder, with none of the cohesive properties required for the manufacture of what the Flemish call a sneeuwman. Abandoning the original project, my girlfriend sat down on the submerged lawn. As her body reached this thrillingly accessible position her dog attempted to mount her, over and over again. He would not desist. Exasperated, my girlfriend made a decision she had long toyed with. She condemned his balls. Read More
April 1, 2013 In Memoriam The Old Order Changeth By Sadie Stein Richard Griffiths, the revered character actor of stage and screen, died this week at sixty-five. While known for roles ranging from Hector in The History Boys to Vernon Dursley in Harry Potter, here at the Review, we will always have a place in our hearts for Withnail and I’s Uncle Monty, whom Griffiths managed to make one of the great comic—and tragic—figures of cinema.
April 1, 2013 The Revel Paula Fox, in Plain Sight By Tom Bissell This year our Spring Revel will take place on April 9. In anticipation of the event, the Daily is featuring a series of essays celebrating Paula Fox, who is being honored this year with The Paris Review’s Hadada Prize. In 1998, which now feels like a Triassically distant time, I was twenty-four years old and on the publishing make. Technically, I was an editorial assistant, but I was making bold, audacious, and sometimes highly presumptuous assistant editor moves. I had some call, mind you. W. W. Norton, the house that employed me, had encouraged me to come up with “ideas” for the paperback committee, which at the time felt like a huge honor. Correction: it was a huge honor. I had a few ideas, most of which, I was gently informed, stank. But one didn’t. This was the idea I had of republishing a thirty-year-old novel about a cat bite (and urban collapse, race relations, gentrification, and New York City) called Desperate Characters. Read More
April 1, 2013 On the Shelf This Is Your Life on Books, and Other News By Sadie Stein The book lover’s dilemma, via Rena Maguire. Merriam-Webster’s is movin’ with the times, incorporating such newfangled phrases as the hideous bucket list, 2010-ish game changer, mysterious robocall, belated mashup, usefulcrowdsourcing, unfortunate cyberbullying, and inevitable viral. If Marx lived today, speculates one biographer, “he would be a compulsive blogger, and picking Twitter fights with Andrew Sullivan and Naomi Klein.” Speaking of! Celebrate Easter (belatedly) by testing your knowledge of resurrections in literature. Genius in literature: a handy-dandy chart.