paper trail

Jul 21, 2011 @ 4:00:00 am

Joseph Heller, via Epic Black Car

At The Guardian, Jim Crace surveys the history of phone hacking in literature.

New York magazine argues that one of the main characters in Jeff Eugenides’s forthcoming novel The Marriage Plot (which we’ll all be hearing plenty about over the next several months) is modeled on David Foster Wallace.

A lesbian couple is asked to stop holding hands—at a Gertrude Stein exhibition in San Francisco.

As British Prime Minister David Cameron comes under attack for his ties to the Murdoch empire, News International stock enjoyed an upward bounce Tuesday thanks to Rupert’s testimony before Parliament. Romenesko writes that the Wall Street Journal has run at least seven editorials this week in defense of its parent company, News Corp.

Music critic Anthony Tommasini takes in the cacophonous sounds of a Yankees game.

The first chapter of Catch-18—the original title of Catch-22—received a lukewarm reception from Joseph Heller’s literary agency; that is, until it fell into the hands of Candida Donadio, a twenty-four-year-old Brooklynite who “smoked and drank heavily, indulged heartily in Italian meals,” and, according to Cork Smith (Thomas Pynchon’s first editor) “had more synonyms for excrement than anyone you’d ever run across.” It would be another year before Heller turned in the novel’s second chapter, and Donadio would go on to become one of the most prominent agents of her generation, representing John Cheever, Philip Roth, Jessica Mitford, William Gaddis, and Peter Matthiessen. Tracy Daugherty’s new Joseph Heller biography, Just One Catch, sketches out the details of Catch-22’s path to publication and is excerpted in the August issue of Vanity Fair. For further reading, the Paris Review interview with Robert Gottlieb (Heller’s editor and the only editor ever interviewed in the magazine) is available online, as is Heller’s 1974 Paris Review interview with George Plimpton.