Bret Easton Ellis is severing his real estate ties to New York by renting out his East Village loft apartment, the New York Observer reports. Ellis’s 950 square-foot apartment is available for five grand a month, but those who can’t afford Patrick Bateman level rent are advised to at least check out the American Psycho author’s open house, which is being held later today and this coming Sunday afternoon.
Paul Auster, Francine Prose, Colson Whitehead and Kurt Andersen are several of the participants in this year's Brooklyn Book Festival. A full lineup was announced yesterday.
In a literary/artistic version of the game ‘exquisite corpse,’ Jonathan Safran Foer is teaming up with Yale dean Samuel Messer and ten female artists to curate a retrospective for a fictional character known only as “S—.” Each artist has been asked contribute a painting corresponding to a different phase of S—’s life—she was born in 1950 and the show extends up until 2010—and for each work, Safran Foer will write an accompanying wall text. None of the artists are aware of what the others are doing, though all will respond to S—’s biography.
In response to Martin Amis’s claim last week that women write sex scenes better than men, The Guardian has posted a quiz challenging readers to guess whether excerpts of erotica were written by men or women.
Dot com online booksellers may soon be a thing of the past—Amazon and eight other companies have applied for licenses to register the .book internet domain.
n+1 stirs up social media circles with a provocative essay on Twitter’s effect on language. Among other things, the piece names David Foster Wallace as the progenitor of a “blog-style” of writing that Twitter has helped counteract. (On Twitter, Adam Sternberg notes that Maud Newton made this same observation nearly a year ago). The argument goes that while blogging led to a proliferation of the personal—per DFW—due to its spatial limitations, Twitter “has brought about a surprising revival of the epigrammatic impulse in a literary culture that otherwise values the merely personal and the super-colloquial as badges of authenticity.”
Penguin Press has signed Iowan Tracey Garvis Graves to a two-book deal after her self-published debut, On the Island. A variation on Lord of the Flies for those interested in teacher-student romance, the book is about a teenage boy who gets stranded on an island with his thirty-year-old teacher. Since it was released in March, the book has sold over 340,000 copies and been optioned for a movie. Penguin will reissue Island and publish its follow-up, Covet, in December 2013.
