Belle and Sebastian founding member Stuart David is writing a memoir. In the All-Night Cafe is slated to be released next year by a UK imprint of Little, Brown, and it will cover the early years of the band: from when Davis met co-founder Stuart Murdoch in Glasgow through the release of their debut album Tigermilk (which includes the many literary lyrics, such as "The priest in the booth had a photographic memory for all he had heard / He took all of my sins and he wrote a pocket novel called The State That I'm In). Davis has written two novels, and once told an interviewer, "I don't feel that working in a band is time-consuming enough. There's always a huge amount of time spent doing nothing in a band—hence all the drugs/alcohol to try and fill up the empty time. I don't really like alcohol or drugs, so I filled up the rest of the time writing books.”
The Observer takes the pulse of the genre known as “street lit.”
The Nation has launched a digital books imprint called eBookNation, which will make Nation pieces available to subscribers with smartphones and tablets. The series will kick off Gore Vidal’s State of the Union, Nation Essays 1958-2005, and will be followed by Victor Navasky’s The Art of Controversy, Jeremy Scahill’s Dirty Wars, and Katha Pollitt’s The Mind-Body Problem.
On Sunday, poets will celebrate the Brooklyn Bridge’s 130th anniversary by reading Hart Crane’s epic The Bridge in its entirety. The event, which begins at 3pm and will take place at Pier 1 in Brooklyn Bridge Park, will feature Mary Jo Bang, Timothy Donnelly, Jorie Graham, Dorothea Lasky, Eileen Myles, Robert Polito, Susan Wheeler, John Yau, and others.
In his forthcoming book You Are Not a Gadget (which Choire Sicha reviews in our summer issue), Jaron Lanier makes a few predictions about the future of book publishing, which Moby Lives has helpfully excerpted: “There will be much more information available in some semblance of book form than ever before, but the quality will go down; book won’t be the same for each person because the information will be updated and the stakes of producing a finished manuscript won’t be as high; Writing a book won’t mean as much, which could be considered democratic or antielitist, but it’s a result of lowering standards; People will pay less to read, but authors will earn less.”
