Ron Rosenbaum, fresh from the fight over the posthumous publication of Vladimir Nabokov's unfinished novel The Original of Laura, steels himself for the "next Nabokov controversy." This time, it is over the poem within Nabokov's novel Pale Fire, ("written" by character John Shade), which Ginko Press plans to publish as a standalone in a lavish edition this fall, blessed by both Nabokov's son Dmitri and biographer Brian Boyd. Rosenbaum is all for it, writing: "I think the Gingko Press edition will provoke an important argument, and more importantly get people to experience the pleasures of the poem with or without its mad annotations."
Means's Season: An interview with fiction writer David Means from the Rumpus (and one on the Leonard Lopate Show), a video of him reading from FSG's blog Work in Progress, and a review by Jon Raymond of Means's new story collection, The Spot, from Bookforum's summer issue.
Do you wish you were trapped "in the ruins of a public library, with lots of food and all the time in the world" to read all the books you want? Do you see the world through book-colored glasses? Perhaps you wish that video games considered classic literature as inspiration and that books were "performance-enhanced." Then sign up for Alikewise, "a dating site that allows you to find people based on their book tastes." If you get lucky you might find your perfect partner to share The Ark with—and pretty soon you'll be parading around town with matching t-shirts, hand-in-hand back to the library, ahead of the curve on the next pop-culture trend.
