David Rakoff’s posthumous book Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish will be released this month, less than a year after his death last August. The New York Times remembers the late essayist, and offers an early look at the novel, which “spans decades, from turn-of-the-20th-century Chicago to midcentury Manhattan to San Francisco at the height of the AIDS crisis, and then to the near-present, when a grief-stricken man opens a wrapped box from long ago, and all the years—with the longings and indignities and small, eventful generosities they contain—collapse into a single moment.”
The U.S. government has announced that it will not follow a plan proposed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development that would close international tax loopholes for multinational companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon.
How literary sleuthing and authorship attribution software successfully ID’d J.K. Rowling as mystery author Robert Galbraith.
In a recent interview in the Boston Review, Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche scandalized the doyens of the African literary establishment by critiquing one of the continent’s top literary prizes. In response to a question about the state of Nigerian fiction, Adiche critiqued the “over-privileging of the Caine Prize,” and remarked that “for me it’s not the arbiter of the best fiction in Africa. It’s never been.” Those shortlisted for this year’s prize have not been happy about her dismissal.
At The Atlantic, Ta-Nehesi Coates looks at the letter of the law that allowed George Zimmerman to walk after killing sixteen-year-old Trayvon Martin, and comes away with “two seemingly conflicted truths” about the legal system in the U.S. “The first is that based on the case presented by the state, and based on Florida law, George Zimmerman should not have been convicted of second-degree murder or manslaughter. The second is that the killing of Trayvon Martin is a profound injustice.”
To recap: on Monday, Juror B37 in the George Zimmerman trial acquired a literary agent, then several hours later, lost that literary agent. But lest we worry that somebody won’t capitalize off the whole tragic affair, the New York Daily News reports that a book written by Zimmerman’s close friend is climbing the charts. Defending Our Friend: The Most Hated Man in America is Mark Osterman’s account of living with Zimmerman in the months before his trial began.
