Pomona College is trying to fill David Foster Wallace's former teaching position. The top candidates—Chris Abani, Edie Meidav, and Jonathan Lethem—have infinitely large expectations to live up to.
But out your PJs: Tonight, Bookforum contributor Wayne Koestenbaum and Jeff Dolven discuss the "poetics of sleep" from bunk beds.
From an interview with Mary Gaitskill, in which she talks about literary film adaptations, the JT Leroy controversy, and Nabokov's The Original of Laura: "it’s a travesty to have published it. Nabokov was a perfectionist. I don’t even want to read it, frankly." (At the American Scholar, Brian Boyd disagrees.) Gaitskill knows her Nabokov; listen to her read and discuss his story "Symbols and Signs."
The Atlantic has been around since 1857, but the magazine is always looking for ways to evolve. For one thing, it's selling fiction on the Kindle. And while it's hard to believe that this will bring in much money, it's nice, for a change, to see someone not freaking out about the future of publishing.
From Chapman/Chapman, e-book enhancements we actually like.
Joan Schenkar, the author of a recent Patricia Highsmith biography, has written a charming article about New Yorker writer Stanley Edgar Hyman, horror writer Shirley Jackson, and Schenkar’s experience at Bennington college before it became Bret Easton Ellis’s stomping ground: "We girls, drunk on art and life and Blue Nun Liebfraumilch, roamed the fields naked under full moons, arguing passionately about things that mattered."
