paper trail

Jan 17, 2013 @ 12:18:00 am

Marie Calloway

Tyrant Books—which has published work by Brian Evenson, Blake Butler, and Sam Michel, among others—had plans to release What Purpose Did I Serve in Your Life, by the much-discussed author Marie Calloway, in June. But this week, Tyrant publisher Giancarlo DiTrapano received bad news from his printer, Sterling Pierce: “Due to the content, we are going to have to pass on printing [Calloway’s] book.”

Christopher Hitchens has only been dead for a little over a year, but he’s still going to be put on trial in a new book coming out in the UK this month. Richard Seymour's Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens will take Hitchens to task for his political views, in particular his move away from the left, and his support of the Iraq War and Bush-era policies. "It is written in the spirit of a trial," Seymour told the Guardian. "I do attempt to get a sense of the complexity and gifts of the man, but it is very clearly a prosecution, and you can guess my conclusion." There are no plans yet to release the book in the U.S.

Writer Janet Coleman is writing a series of reminiscences about what it was like to work at the New York Review of Books in its first years. Coleman worked at the magazine from 1963 to 1966, and explains Robert Silvers’s daily routine: “Mornings, he’d dig from his pockets semi-legible names and addresses on folded blue scraps of his checkbook and attach each of them to a semi-legible assignment draft. He exchanged long chatty calls with Advisory Editor Elizabeth Hardwick and George Plimpton, his best friend. He’d plow through the piles of new books and catalogs that arrived twice a day. He’d take and make calls to writers; sign on to lunches, book parties, social events. Sometimes he’d cop a piece of my bagel.”

At the New Yorker’s Page Turner blog, Maria Bustillos reflects on the pleasures of reading distemperate, or flat-out repulsive, writers.

What’s proper etiquette upon being name-checked in a bad—and factually incorrect—book? Salon’s Cary Tennis advises.