On Wednesday, New York Public Library president Anthony Marx unveiled plans for the Norman Foster-led redesign of the NYPL flagship branch at Byrant Park. The plan will raise the amount of public space in the library from thirty to seventy percent, and will incorporate additional “light-filled reading areas.” The big downside is that the library will house fewer books: More than three million volumes are being moved off-site, and many writers have protested that they no longer feel welcome to work at the library. “Scholars are people, too, and we are beginning to feel, well, if not threatened, increasingly crowded out,” author Edmund Morris recently told the New York Times.
Introducing the Queen James Bible, a gay-friendly bible that attempts to "long-standing interpretive ambiguity in key Bible passages regarding homosexuality."
The publisher Hachette has filed suit against Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Ben Cramer for failing to deliver two books he was commissioned to write. According to the Smoking Gun, Cramer signed a $1.5 million contract in 2006 to write two books, one of which was to be a behind-the-scenes account of New York Yankee Alex Rodriguez. Cramer never turned anything in, and in late 2011, Hachette terminated the contract and demanded that he return the $550,000 they had already paid him.
In an essay for Margaux Williamson’s blog, Sheila Heti responds to criticism that any writing about the process of making art is fundamentally “privileged, narcissistic, and childish." But, she responds, "Artists should think about art, and should talk about it together, the same way people agitating for social change should talk about social change together. Would Occupy Wall Street have happened if people didn’t finally decide to put their collective grievances into a public space and talk about them? Art is not frivolous. Art is not a luxury. It moves the world forward."
A seventeen-year-old has landed a book deal with Random House after her self-published online romance series “The Kissing Booth” racked up 19 million views.
The punchline practically writes itself: David Brooks is teaching a class on humility at Yale.
