paper trail

Mar 19, 2010 @ 7:00:00 am

Elizabeth Benedict

Over at the Washington Post: "The least-accurate political memoirs ever written."

The evidence, provided by author Frank Owen, is conclusive: Gerald Posner is a "journalistic vampire." Advice for Posner: Don't threaten to punch Owen in the nose.

Amazon and Apple are in the midst of a high-stakes scrap over e-book pricing. Apple's iPad hasn't been released yet, but the buzz surrounding its hypothetical book app has reduced Amazon to drastic tactics.

Elizabeth Benedict, editor of the anthology Mentors and Muses, sums up her feelings about e-books in six words. (We need only two words, the last of which is off.)

Yesterday, the eBook Newser blog provided a pirated version of Roberto Bolano's 2666. We thought we had a literary Napster on our hands, but they quickly removed the link. Now they only proffer legal e-books, which are no less thrilling to read, like G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday.

Jonathan Lethem and Patti Smith will share the stage at the PEN 2010 World Voices Festival. We look forward to seven days of similarly edifying encounters, beginning April 26th, between authors from around the globe, including Aleksandar Hemon, Yiyun Li, Karl O. Knausgaard, Shirley Hazzard, Elias Khoury, and more than one-hundred others.

Saturday night Monica Youn will read from her latest collection, Ignatz, a collection of poems that play on George Herriman’s classic comic strip Krazy Kat. This isn't your ordinary chain-bookstore author event: Providing a live soundtrack will be Matmos, the electronic duo that has revealed its literary leanings in songs devoted to Ludwig Wittgenstein and Patricia Highsmith.