New Yorkers: What are you doing tonight? It can’t be better than coming to the event we're co-hosting! "The Naked Truth," a panel on female sexuality in fiction, will feature Lynne Tillman, Chris Kraus, Emilie Noteris, and Wendy Delorme, and be moderated by How Should a Person Be? author Sheila Heti. The panel will be held at the New School as part of the Villet Gillet's Walls and Bridges series, and more details are available here.
None other than Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has confirmed that Kindles still aren’t making the company any money, though they are poaching potential customers from Apple. "We sell the hardware at our cost," Bezos said of the Kindle Fire HD and Paperwhites, and adds: "What we find is that when people buy a Kindle they read four times as much as they did before they bought the Kindle."
More than sixteen thousand books have come out about Abraham Lincoln, and at least twenty more will be published in the U.S. before next summer (not to mention a Steven Spielberg biopic). What is it about the sixteenth president that is so alluring to the publishing industry?
Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin “spent a good portion of their time at Oxford abusing the literature they were supposed to study,” writes Keith Gessen in his introduction to the NYRB re-release of Lucky Jim. “They invented a game called ‘horsepissing,’ in which they’d replace words from classic literary texts with obscenities—’I have gathered up six slender basketfuls OF HORSEPISS,’ for example—which they’d write in their own and each other’s copies of famous books. It was a game they never tired of or, indeed, outgrew.”
The Fall issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review, on “the female conscience,” is out, with contributions by Roxane Gay, Stephen Burt, Joyce Carol Oates, and Judith Warner.
Robert Atwan, the editor of the Best American Essays series, picks his ten favorite essays written since 1950. Many of them—Sontag’s “Notes on Camp,” Mailer’s “White Negro,” and Phillip Lopate’s "Against Joie de Vivre"—are available to read online.
