paper trail

Jan 7, 2013 @ 12:13:00 am

Master blurber (and documentary subject) Gary Shteyngart.

There’s a copy of Rick Moody’s Purple America for sale on E-Bay, and it’s not just any old copy. “THIS BOOK WAS OWNED BY BERNIE MADOFF,” the seller boasts.

The Penguin Press has announced its plans to publish Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, The Bleeding Edge. Publication date TBA. Meanwhile, rumors are swirling that the reclusive author “may be working” with director Paul Thomas Anderson on the director’s forthcoming film adaptation of Pynchon’s 2009 novel, Inherent Vice.

At The Awl, Maud Newton looks to novelist Muriel Spark’s characters for advice for the coming year. Insomniacs, take note of this bit of wisdom from Spark’s Ms. Hawkins: "Insomnia is not bad in itself. You can lie awake at night and think; the quality of insomnia depends entirely on what you decide to think of. Can you decide to think?— Yes you can. You can put your mind to anything most of the time. Who lives without problems every day? Why waste the nights on them?"

Edward Campion has released a short documentary/mockumentary about Gary Shteyngart—his life, career, and weakness for writing book blurbs. (“These are all people I’d be happy to be in a hot tub with,” he says of the writers he has endorsed.) Edmund White, A.M. Homes, Karen Russell, and many others...

The marquee act in the first digital edition of Newsweek is Tom Wolfe, who in “Eunuchs of the Universe” offers a searing indictment of how the world of finance went wrong.

One of the books featured on the back-page ad of this week’s New Yorker is Rosemary Okun’s An Imperfect Life, which is self-published.