King Wenclas, the former leader of the Underground Literary Alliance, is gearing up to publish his new book, The McSweeney’s Gang, which is “a satire of today's literary world.” Wenclas has been an outspoken critic of perennial award-winners and the publshing elite, and his book will feature fictionalized versions of Dave Eggers (whose novel Hologram was just named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times), Vendela Vida, George Saunders, Jennifer Egan, and others.
Salman Rushdie has called Chinese writer and Nobel Prize winner Mo Yan a “patsy of the regime” for failing to support a petition supporting the release of imprisoned writer Liu Xiaobo.
American Psycho author and prolific tweeter Bret Easton Ellis stuck his foot in his mouth again last week by tweeting that The Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow is "overrated" because she’s a "very hot woman." When pressed on the issue, Ellis remarked, "I still believe that if The Hurt Locker had been directed by a man it would not have won the Oscar for best director."
For anyone who wants to know exactly what Lena Dunham’s $3.7 million book proposal looks like, Gawker has leaked a copy. While Gawker calls the soon-to-be-book as “literary lifecasting,” the Atlantic Wire predicts that it will give readers “exactly what they want.” We suspect neither is wrong.
Eloise Klein Healy has been named Los Angeles’s first-ever Poet Laureate.
Courtesy of the American Reader, here’s an excerpt from a movie pitch that Vladimir Nabokov sent to Alfred Hitchcock: "A girl, a rising star of not quite the first magnitude, is courted by a budding astronaut. She is slightly condescending to him; has an affair with him but may have other lovers, or lover, at the same time. One day he is sent on the first expedition to a distant star; goes there and makes a successful return. Their positions have now changed. He is the most famous man in the country while her starrise has come to a stop at a moderate level. She is only too glad to have him now, but soon she realizes that he is not the same as he was before his flight." Hitchcock passed on that, and on Nabokov’s other idea: a Cold War-era film about a man who defected to the U.S.
