Keith Richards's memoir Life, for which he was paid a $7 million advance, is out, and the reviews are good. Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani—clearly a Stones fan—calls the book "electrifying." She continues: "Mr. Richards’s prose is like his guitar playing: intense, elemental, utterly distinctive and achingly, emotionally direct." At the Huffington Post, Jesse Kornbluth says Richards "serves [up his storires] like his guitar riffs—in your face, nasty, confrontational, rich, smart, and, in the end, unforgettable." (The stories include how he did drugs not to nod out, but so he could work.) Audiobook fans are in for an additional layer of intensity: It will be read/performed by Johnny Depp.
They still edit copy, don't they? Bygone Bureau takes a look at the online editing processes at The Morning News, McSweeney's, and The Awl. The Gray Lady recently profiled the latter, quoting editor Choire Sicha's advice for would-be web barons: "All it takes is some WordPress and a lot of typing. Sure, I went broke trying to start it, it trashed my life and I work all the time, but other than that, it wasn’t that hard to figure out.”
Publishers Weekly will be publishing its list of top ten books of the year on November 8th. Between now and then, editors will be blogging about some of their selections. First up: Martin Amis's The Pregnant Widow.
Tonight at the New School, Bookforum co-editor, critic, and poet Albert Mobilio will read and discuss his work with Robert Polito. Mobilio has a new book of verse, Touch Wood, forthcoming from Black Square Editions. Poet Robert Creeley praised Mobilio's first book, The Geographics, as a volume that "manages the double ground of a nightmarish surrealism and a dryly perceptive wit. It's as if Humphrey Bogart were taking a good, if final, look at what's called the world."
Tom McCarthy chats with Bookworm's Michael Silverblatt, who describes McCarthy's Booker-nominated C as a “novel that wants you, and wants itself, to know as much as possible.”
Jonathan Franzen's meeting with President Barack Obama at the White House: "delightful."
