paper trail

Dec 13, 2010 @ 9:00:00 am

Jonathan Franzen and family, circa 1975. From the Paris Review.

If you've ever registered on Gawker or one of its sister sites, you may have had your username, email, and password stolen. Gawker assures users that the irony has not been lost on them.

The Onion’s AV club has apologized for running a review written by an author who clearly didn’t bother to read the book.

Tariq Ali writes that the “neo-con” Liu Xiaobo shouldn’t have received the Nobel Peace prize this year because Liu has supported the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and Korea.

The Daily Beast has posted a few choice excerpts from the Paris Review’s interview with Jonathan Franzen, which will be on newsstands this week. On the eminent critic James Wood, Franzen offers this dismissive squawk: “I stopped reading my reviews after James Woods' piece on The Corrections . . . what he wrote was a quibbling and carping and narrowly censorious thing, with a willfully dense misreading of my Harper’s essay.”

If your author friends seem especially distracted lately, it is probably because they’re wondering why their book isn’t selling in Wichita, as Amazon has recently granted authors access to Nielsen BookScan’s weekly geographic sales figures.

Tonight at the 92nd Street Y, New Yorker stalwarts Ian Frazier and John McPhee discuss their recent work with Mark Singer.