On July 30, Kevin Morrissey, the managing editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, took his own life. Following that, questions were raised about how the award-winning literary magazine, which is affiliated with the University of Virginia, has been run under editor Ted Genoways. Most have questioned how the magazine spent its money, and some have debated whether Genoways was a "bully" in the workplace. But no one predicted that the small-print-run journal would cancel its winter issue and close its offices—or that it would become national news. That this is happening a month after Morrissey's death suggests that the journal's problems—financial and/or interpersonal—are still coming to light.
n+1 has started publishing a new online film review journal, N1FR, and has already gotten into a "Twitter-tussle" with New Yorker film critic Richard Brody, who takes issue with Christian Lorentzen's article "Dicking Around." Brody writes that Lorentzen "displays little imaginative sympathy for an artist whose subject is practical intelligence and mass media." The artist in question? The immortal Judd Apatow. Other highlights from the inaugural issue: Christine Smallwood on Claire Denis and Chris Fujiwara's wide-ranging essay, "To Have Done with the Contemporary Cinema."
Gregory Levey's memoir Shut Up, I'm Talking, has more than 692,000 Facebook fans, but many of them don't read books.
From Imprint, a short interview with artist Joanna Neborsky, whose Illustrated Three Line Novels: Felix Feneon is an inspired collection of twenty-eight collages that illuminate the fin-de-siecle Parisian anarchist Feneon's extremely brief news stories. Neborsky says she was drawn to the 2007 volume Novels in Three Lines, which collects more than 1,000 of Feneon's blurbs, because it is a book "about rude disaster and crummy behavior from all over France, told in an elegant, dry style. As a rule I am unable to resist things that are pessimistic and French. I bought three copies."
