Lena Dunham is shopping around a book proposal, and word has it that the manuscript isn’t going to go for any less than a cool million. According to a leaked email from her literary agent, the Girls creator is currently taking bids on the book, and will stop accepting publishing house suitors by the end of the day on Wednesday. The book is titledNot That Kind of Girl: Advice by Lena Dunham, and according to David Haglund at Slate, will include chapters on “losing her virginity, trying to eat well (detailed diet journal included), obsessing about death, and so on, along with tips about how to stay focused on work, how not to ruin a potential relationship, and . . . various ways in which older men continue to be condescending and sexist.”
Dinaw Mengestu, Junot Diaz, and journalist David Finkel are the three writers in this year’s class of MacArthur “genius grant” fellows. The $500,000 prize will be paid out to the twenty-three winners over the next five years with no strings attached. If you're not familiar with the winners, the Millions has a rundown of these new literary geniuses, and we highly recommend checking out Sam Anderson’s profile of Diaz in last week’s New York Times Magazine.
We’re deeply upset to learn that we missed Arnold Schwarzenegger’s surprise book signing at the McNally Jackson bookstore in Manhattan on Monday. The Terminator and former governor of California descended upon the store that afternoon to promote his autobiography, Total Recall, and by the end of the visit manager David Reeves told the Guardian that the store had sold out its entire stock.
Longtime New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin has won the Thurber Prize for American Humor for his book Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin: Forty Years of Funny Stuff. If you haven’t read Trillin before, an archive of his New Yorker writing is available here.
Paris Review editor Lorin Stein reflects on his early days climbing the ranks at Farar, Straus & Giroux: “I don’t think I distinguished myself, I think I just happened to be the secretary of the most powerful editor in the building.”
At Poetry Magazine, Abigail Deutsch wonders why people are so excited about Alien vs. Predator author Michael Robbins.
Tonight at 6:30pm at Art in General, Jill Magid reads from her new book Failed States, her meditation on "coincidence and poetics amid the barriers and bureaucracy of governmental power." The book was inspired, in part, by the artist's witnessing of a sniper attack in Texas.
