paper trail

Mar 13, 2013 @ 12:42:00 am

An architectural mock-up for Rem Koolhaas's National Library in Qatar

Nick Yarris, a former death row inmate who was exonerated after 21 years in solitary confinement, has filed suit against HarperCollins for yanking his life story, Seven Days to Live, off shelves after he was arrested again for growing marijuana. He’s suing the publisher for breach of contract, and trying to get the book back into print.

Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of the Great Gatsby, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan, will open the Cannes Film Festival on May 15.

When individuals escape from a fundamentalist religion or cult and manage to land a book deal, the writer they most often end up working with is Lisa Pulitzer, the “midwife of harrowing memoirs.” Pulitzer has co-authored two books—one having to do with a polygamous sect, the other with Scientology—and is currently working on another about the Westboro Baptist Church. Pulitzer has no personal ties to cults, according to a New York Times profile; she got to where she is in part because “she has a motherly presence that is comforting to women who are about to expose raw truths of a sordid past, allowing her to establish a level of trust with them quickly.”

Rem Koolhaas will be building the new National Library in Qatar.

As cardinals convene in the Vatican to elect a new Pope, Adam Thirlwell, at the Paris Review blog, talks with author Francisco Pacifico about what it means to write a funny Catholic novel, and how to make a book sound “like Ratzinger singing ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart.’”