Chuck Klosterman has been named the new Ethicist at the New York Times Magazine. Here is his first column.
Condemning books has always been a good way to launch them to bestsellerdom, but the Catholic Church seems to have missed that memo. This week, Sister Margaret Farley’s Just Love jumped from 142,982 to 16 on Amazon’s sales list after the Church denounced the book, a treatise on Christian sexual ethics.
Philip Roth paid homage to the recently deceased Carlos Fuentes on Wednesday when he accepted Spain’s Asturias Award for Literature.
In honor of this week’s reopening of the Algonquin Hotel, the Observer names a number of social luminaries who deserve seats at the literary hangout.
The Atlantic Wire's Jen Doll surveys the state of publishing through this year's Book Expo America. She talks with New York City booksellers about the year's buzzy YA novels and takes the overall industry's pulse. "On our visit, things looked pretty good," she writes. "The booths were indeed packed and there were plenty of people—maybe even more people than books. Still, the sense that better times were in the past is inescapable."
Here's some bizarre BEA news: The prime suspect in the 2004 murder of a Jullliard student was also at the convention this week, shopping around a self-published book he had written about the case.
On Thursday, Natasha Trethewey was named the country’s nineteenth Poet Laureate. The author of three poetry collections and one nonfiction book about post-Katrina New Orleans, Trethewey is the first Southern to hold the post since Robert Penn Warren, and the first black person to receive the award since 1993. Her fourth collection, Thrall, is due out this fall.
