paper trail

Jan 20, 2012 @ 2:00:00 am

One of Sera Hur's Murakami/Sartorialist mashups

Want to glimpse inside what is soon to become the world’s most expensive book? The Guardian runs a slideshow of images from John James Audobon’s The Birds of America, a book of ornithological illustrations that goes on auction at Sotheby’s tomorrow.

Don’t go into it for the money: According to a New York Times Economix blog breakdown, newspaper writers and editors have a one in 62 chance of breaking into the one percent.

What is the role of criticism today? Hear Elif Batuman, Rivka Galchen, Mark Athitakis, Eric Banks, and our very own Michael Miller discuss how criticism informs, inflects, and even colonizes other forms of writing tomorrow at seven at The Center for Fiction.

Earlier this week, Jennifer Weiner’s revisited the subject of gender disparity in the New York Times Book Review. Her summary, per a tweet: “NYT sexist, unfair, loves Gary Shteyngart, hates chick lit, ignores romance.” Now, Salon’s Teddy Wayne claims she’s got it backwards: “For the majority of male literary authors — excluding the upper echelon of Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides, Don DeLillo and their ilk, plus a few younger writers like Chad Harbach who have scored much-ballyhooed advances — it’s actually harder than it is for women to carve out a financially stable writing career”.

Murakami, meet the Sartorialist.