The Guardian “discovers” literary Brooklyn in a breathless essay that name checks every Brooklyn-based writer from James Agee to Martin Amis, and then goes on to detail their weekly soccer games and favorite coffee shops. For readers without the time or patience to read the article, Moby Lives provides a snarky summary, which ends by naming every Brooklyn author named in this “invaluable work of reportage.”
Nathan Englander beat out Etgar Keret, Sarah Hall and Kevin Barry to win the 25,000 euro Frank O'Connor prize for his short story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank.
Anne Rice is jumping on the E.L. James bandwagon, or rather, her publishers are. This Thursday, Plume will re-release Sleeping Beauty, a trilogy of erotic thrillers Rice wrote in the 1980s under the pen name A. N. Roquelaure, with a 50 Shades of Grey slant. The new editions—which will published under Rice’s real name—come with new covers and are emblazoned with the phrase “if you liked 50 Shades of Grey, you’ll love the Sleeping Beauty trilogy.”
This is the first paragraph of Zadie Smith’s novel NW, which comes out in the U.S. this September: “The fat sun stalls by the phone masts. Anti-climb paint turns sulphurous on school gates and lampposts. In Willesden people go barefoot, the streets turn European, there is a mania for eating outside. She keeps to the shade. Redheaded. On the radio: I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me. A good line—write it out on the back of a magazine. In a hammock, in the garden of a basement flat. Fenced in, on all sides.”
At the New Yorker’s Page Turner blog, Pulitzer Prize juror Michael Chabon offers a blow-by-blow of why the board failed to award a winner this year—and why the decision was as much a shock to the three jurors as anybody else.
Next year’s Book Expo America has been bumped back a week to lower hotel costs for attendees. The 2013 conference will take place from May 30 to June 1 at the Jacob Javits center in New York, and thanks to the schedule shift, is expected to cost ten to twenty percent less.
From gorgonize to yonderly: a visual thesaurus of unusual words.
