paper trail

Jan 31, 2012 @ 4:00:00 am

Teju Cole

At the Paris Review Daily, Avi Steinberg considers the relationship between libraries and pornography, and how the library, “once a hothouse of Eros and a laboratory of realism, has become a burial site.”

Open City author Teju Cole has been appointed the distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Bard College.

NYRB Classic’s blog has posted “Good Morning, Giantess!,” the first story from Robert Walser’s new collection, Berlin Stories.

Investigative journalism organization ProPublica presents its new (and very timely) Tumblr: “Officials Say the Darndest Things.”

What’s the difference between literary and genre fiction? (Aside from success on the New York Times bestseller list?) A literary agent explains.

In Madrid, an art exhibition about French avant-garde writer Raymond Roussel, “Locus Solus,” includes work by Joseph Cornell, Salvador Dali, and Cristina Iglesias, but, sadly, not Roussel’s “land yacht.”

Tonight at 192 Books, Adam Johnson reads from his new book, The Orphan Master’s Son, which Wyatt Mason praises in this week’s New Yorker. Mason writes, Johnson does “a superb job of conjuring the almost surreal physical particularities of the country, its cities that go dark at nightfall, as the nation’s generators go silent until dawn.”