paper trail

Jul 7, 2011 @ 4:00:00 am

Jennifer 8. Lee

Blogger, author, cooking show host, and all-around media phenomenon Emily Gould is about to add another role to her ever-expanding repertoire: niche e-book vendor. The Observer reports that Gould and Ruth Curry, the best friend featured in Gould’s 2008 New York Times Magazine cover story, are discussing launching an imprint with OR Books. EmilyBooks.com is described as a “curated site” that will carry “a small number of hand-selected books.” According to an email Gould sent to OR co-founder John Oakes: “Our goal is to be super-specialized and targeted and to build an audience that trusts us.”

Former New York Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee on the paper’s reluctant embrace of new media: “Like any body with a hardy immune system, it often rejects new presences as foreign.”

At the Paris Review Daily, Anna North reflects on the art of the acknowledgments page and the perils of thanking everybody the writer has known since grade school. “Parsimony,” North suggests, “may be a good strategy here—thanking only those people who, for instance, actually read the manuscript.” For more on the subject, readers are advised to check out Tom Bissell’s blistering appreciation of novelist Elizabeth Wurtzel’s approach to the issue.

Though he’s arguably Argentina’s most famous literary son, Borges also taught graduate seminars at the University of Texas at Austin, and once proclaimed himself “an honorary citizen of Texas.” At Guernica, Eric Benson embarks on an appropriately Borgesian adventure when he heads to the school’s Ransom Center archives in search of the master’s missing papers.