paper trail

Jun 8, 2011 @ 4:00:00 am

Elizabeth Spiers

The Observer’s redesign of its print edition and website debuts today. Editor-in-chief Elizabeth Spiers told Yahoo News: “The new design does little to distinguish between long form features that appear in the paper and long-form web exclusives, which we'll be doing far more of. . . . [But] the biggest change will be an emphasis on breaking news and smaller scoops throughout the day.”

Open Letter Books is launching a new e-book series.

James Franco should savor this moment: His appearance in the book trailer for the novel Super Sad True Love Story won out over Jay-Z’s chat about his book Decoded in the “Most Celebtastic Performance” category of Melville House’s 2011 Moby Awards for best and worst book trailers. We are pretty sure that this is the first and last time Franco will beat Jay-Z at anything. But maybe the result just emphasizes what the awards’ founder Dennis Johnson has been saying about book trailers all along: “It just seem[s] like, you know, maybe book people should be worrying more about books than about movies.”

April is the cruelest month, but June is the month that brings us T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” as an iPad app. The new version of Eliot’s classic poem includes video performances, extensive notes, and audio readings by Eliot, as well as Ted Hughes and Viggo Mortensen, and manuscript pages that show Ezra Pound’s editing of the poem.

Poet, arts editor, and critic John Yau talks to the New York Foundation for the Arts about the artist’s life.