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By Richard Brookhiser
$10.72
By Benny Morris
$17
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The New York Times ignores a historic environmental demonstration in D.C.; accused hacker Jeremy Hammond speaks out against the government’s faulty “cybersecurity strategy” regarding Aaron Swartz’s prosecution; meanwhile, nudists in Vienna attend an art exhibit on “Nude Men From 1800 to Today” to show off their goods. These discoveries and more after the jump.
Posted on Feb 22, 2013
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Zaheer Chauhan
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By Cherilyn Parsons — In an attempt to promote international understanding, the Jaipur Literature Festival fights against “the terrorism of the mind,” said the event’s producer, Sanjoy Roy.
Posted on Feb 16, 2013
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AP/Michael Probst
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By Susan Zakin — Some people think the book business in on its last legs. But others think it isn’t a business at all.
Posted on Dec 7, 2012
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Alexander Baxevanis (CC-BY)
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Nobody fights better than writers, so it’s a little sad that novelists Salman Rushdie and John le Carré have agreed to stop hating each other.
Posted on Nov 13, 2012
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cdrummbks (CC BY 2.0)
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The glum-faced author announced what appears to be his retirement in a “little-noticed” interview with a French magazine. “To tell you the truth, I’m done,” Roth told Les Inrocks in October, adding that he has not written anything in three years.
Posted on Nov 9, 2012
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Illustration by Mr. Fish
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By Chris Hedges — I learned at the age of 10, when I was shipped off to a New England boarding school where the hazing of younger boys was the principal form of recreation, that those who hunger for power are psychopathic bastards.
Posted on Nov 5, 2012
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Book cover from McSweeney's
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By Chris Hedges — In Dave Eggers’ “A Hologram for the King,” an ordinary man comes to realize that managers like him who made outsourcing possible will be discarded as human refuse now that the globalization process is complete, left to wander like ghosts among the ruins.
Posted on Aug 27, 2012
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AP
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Throughout his adult life and probably his youth, Gore Vidal enjoyed the sort of playful self-adulation that is often mistaken for arrogance when committed by members of the American upper class.
Posted on Aug 1, 2012
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AP/Michael Probst
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By Chris Hedges — If universities think a Milton Friedman or a Friedrich Hayek is more important than a Virginia Woolf or an Anton Chekhov, then we become barbarians.
Posted on Jul 9, 2012
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Ray Bradbury, who died Tuesday night at the age of 91, spoke in 2008 with Truthdig’s Steve Wasserman about his books and the passions that drove his writing. The video, text excerpts and full transcript follow.
Posted on Jun 7, 2012
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Dario Castillejos, Cagle Cartoons, Dario La Crisis —
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philobiblon (CC-BY)
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Harvard professor and author Stephen Greenblatt won a Pulitzer Prize this week for his account of how an ancient Roman philosophical epic jump-started the modern world.
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By Lauren B. Davis —
“When my mother was angry with me, which was often,” writes Jeanette Winterson in her new memoir “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?,” “she said, ‘The devil led us to the wrong crib.’ ”
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Knopf
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French novelist and public provocateur Michel Houellebecq is out to darken the mood and make us laugh uncomfortably at ourselves once again with his newest novel, “The Map and the Territory.” Or is he?
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Steve Rhodes (CC-BY)
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Add George Whitman, the former proprietor of the 60-year-old Parisian bookstore and artist sanctuary Shakespeare and Co., to the list of major cultural figures lost this week. He was 98 years old.
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Illustration by Mr. Fish
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By Mr. Fish — There is always smoke around Lewis Lapham, as if he’d just been conjured by some sorcerer suddenly enraged by the placation of the status quo.
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Facebook.com / BrightonRockMovie
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By Richard Schickel — The original “Brighton Rock” is so good—in its dank and sometimes almost unwatchable way—that it obviates a remake. But that never stopped anyone, did it?
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Flickr / Bethan
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The struggle for the serious study and appreciation of literature continues in our society, where enormous emphasis has been placed on the “practical” disciplines of math and science, and specialized academics more and more produce arcane, overtly politicized work that the public seems to find joyless and irrelevant. (more)
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AP / Chris Pizzello
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We will resist the impulse to do a cheesy riff on the lyrics of Leonard Cohen in reporting that the 76-year-old Canadian singer and poet is this year’s winner of Spain’s prestigious Prince of Asturias literary award.
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Flickr/bertconcepts
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Although there are those purists out there who still insist on reading actual books—as in the kind that come from trees—Amazon’s grand pooh-bah Jeff Bezos announced last week that sales of e-books have now surpassed that of their analog counterparts.
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barnesandnoble.com
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This is a story about a very unusual kind of children’s book—or rather, a book that looks a lot like a children’s book until you read the fine print, at which time it becomes apparent that author Adam Mansbach actually wrote “Go the Fuck to Sleep” for exasperated ... (more)
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Kap, Cagle Cartoons, Spain —
Posted on Apr 17, 2011
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Mr. Fish
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By Mr. Fish — I thought that I’d done everything I was supposed to do. This was back in the springtime of 2007, about seven months before Norman Mailer died.
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barnesandnoble.com
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“The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is about to get a major makeover in the form of a significant edit to be made in NewSouth Books’ edition of Mark Twain’s iconic novel. Specifically, the notorious n-word will be swapped out for “slave,” along with one other race-related alteration.
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Flickr / Ludovic Bertron (CC-BY)
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By Chris Hedges — The two greatest visions of a future dystopia were George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” It turns out they were both right.
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AP / Mary Schwalm
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By Chris Hedges — Like the Ancients, we arrogant humans who turn ourselves into objects of worship and build ruthless systems of power to control the world around us will get what we are due.
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Why President Obama’s gay marriage position has gotten completely absurd, why the DEA is after ebonics linguists and why Jane Austen just couldn’t hack it in today’s publishing world.
Posted on Aug 23, 2010
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André Naffis-Sahely looks at three volumes—“A River Dies of Thirst,” “Mural” and “If I Were Another”—that helped make poet/author Mahmoud Darwish a pillar of Palestinian literature.
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Flickr / dierk schaefer
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How about a little cognitive psychology with your English literature? Professors who normally spend their time thinking about Virginia Woolf’s characters and story structures are taking a page from scientific texts to add a new dimension to their exploration of fiction.
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Today on the list: Does the English department have a Jewish problem? Plus: How to make change actually happen, and more. Updated
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A wondrous new collection of previously unpublished vintage Vonnegut confirms his enduring and subversive ear for the absurd and the tragicomic.
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Flickr / Brian Lane Winfield Moore
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With multiple gadgets and screens constantly running, and perhaps even a different sense of time than our forebears had, it’s no surprise that powering down long enough to curl up with a book is becoming an endangered activity—although, as David L. Ulin argues in the Los Angeles Times, it’s still a very vital contemplative practice to pursue.
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AP photo / Michel Euler
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French novelist Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio was named this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday. Le Clézio, whom the Swedish Academy fancifully described as an “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilisation,” has written more than 20 novels since the early age of 23.
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By Carla Kaplan — A new collection of letters between the fascinating Mitford sisters offers unparalleled insight into one of the 20th century’s most famous families.
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By Steve Wasserman — Although coverage of books in major newspapers may seem to have taken a precipitous downturn in recent months, this decline has been in the works for a while, says longtime writer, literary editor and book aficionado Steve Wasserman, who opines in this CJR article about the high costs of this lamentable cultural sea change.
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By Eugene Robinson — Back when the renowned author was in hiding because of a death threat from the Ayatollah Khomeini, he felt that John le Carre was no help to his cause. “The Satanic Verses” had sparked a spat between two literary lions.
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By Paul Cummins — The author takes aim at the shortcomings of the contemporary American educational system, laments the current state of arts education, and wonders what exactly schools are preparing younger generations to do—and become.
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planetpoint.com
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Arthur M. Schlesinger died Wednesday from a heart attack at the age of 89. A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Kennedy White House fixture, Schlesinger wrote or edited more than 25 books and once referred to George W. Bush’s post-9/11 policy as “a ghastly mess.”
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Edward M. Pio Roda / AP/CNN
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The line between fact and fiction blurs more often in memoirs than we’d like to believe, as this article makes clear. | story
Hey, that sounds like a perfect medium for a certain POTUS we know… browse the book
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Kakutani and Haberman slam the “Million Little Pieces” fabulist for his B.S. spin attempt. | There seems to be no end to the number of potential headline puns stemming from “A Million Little…”
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Oprah.com
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Winfrey’s next monthly selection is a Holocaust memoir. | story
But her now-dubious stamp of approval is hardly a comfort.
Posted on Jan 17, 2006
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Nan Talese, the publisher of admitted embellisher James Frey, spars with her husband, author Gay Talese, over the issue of falsehoods in memoirs. | story
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The Lotto Symbolizes the False Promises of Barracuda Capitalism
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