Philip Gourevitch worked as a bear-skinner, Cynthia Ozick at an accounting firm, and Tobias Wolff as a farmhand—New Yorker contributors reflect on their summer jobs.
Kevin Barry has won the International Dublin IMPAC Award for his novel City of Bohane. Barry beat out Michel Houellebecq, Karen Russell, and Haruki Murakami for the $130,000 prize.
Documentarian Ken Burns has announced that he is going to film a six-hour adaptation of Siddhartha Mukherjee’s book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. Burns was inspired to do the project by the memory of his mother, who died of cancer when he was eleven. The documentary is slated to air on PBS over the course of three nights in 2015.
American Psycho star and fictional serial killer Patrick Bateman makes his literary debut with a write-up of M.E. Thomas’s Confessions of a Sociopath in the Slate Book Review: “On the day [Confessions] arrives, a doorman I haven’t seen before hands the package to me as I return to my building at 1 a.m. I take the elevator up to my apartment and wash my hands and sit in my cream leather chair and chase an Adderall with a J&B and read the book in one sitting.”
Small Canadian press Coach House Books gets some love from Toronto’s Globe and Mail newspaper.
If you are somebody who constantly finds yourself arguing over whether TV shows have any literary value, here’s some new fodder for discussion: The Writers Guild of America has selected their top “101 best written TV series of all time.” The Sopranos leads, followed by Seinfeld.
