paper trail

Jan 25, 2013 @ 12:38:00 am

Jezebel laments the “hideous makeovers” of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day.

The shortlist has been announced for the 2013 Man Booker International Prize. Of the ten nominees, three write in English, and only three—Marilynne Robinson, Lydia Davis, and the French novelist Marie NDiaye—are women. Along with China's Yan Lianke and Russia's Vladimir Sorokin, who have both been censored in their home countries, the other nominees are UR Ananthamurthy (India), Aharon Appelfeld (Israel), Intizar Husain (Pakistan), Josip Novakovich (Canada) and Peter Stamm (Switzerland). The prize will be announced in London at the end of May.

Poor Edgar Allen Poe!Salon’s Laura Miller inventories the cliches and ludicrous plot lines of The Following, the new Fox TV thriller in which a serial killer takes his cues from the author of “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

Homer and Stein and Melville, oh my: the growing popularity of marathon readings.

In the 1970s a young artist named Gary Panter posed the question, “What kind of comics would we read after underground comics?” His answer was Dal Tokyo, “a black-and-white strip that radically redefined the elements of the form and proposed new modes of comics storytelling.” The strip, which Mike Kelley once described as "word salad," is now being collected by Fantagraphics Books.

How does a 29-year-old director convince a famously film-averse writer to let him adapt one of his short stories? Polite persistence. After attempting to contact David Sedaris through his publicists about adapting “‘C.O.G.,’ a fish-out-of-water tale that finds a young Mr. Sedaris working on an apple farm in the Pacific Northwest,” Kyle Patrick Alvarez decided to approach Sedaris at a reading and give him a copy of his debut film. Sedaris liked the film, wrote Alvarez back, and long story short, C.O.G. premieres this week at Sundance.