paper trail

May 3, 2013 @ 12:05:00 am

Paul Thomas Anderson has reportedly started shooting his adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice. The film stars Joaquin Phoenix, who Anderson worked with on The Master, and is set in an fictional California beach town towards the end of the 1960s.

Less than a month after it was announced that John Freeman was resigning as the editor of Granta, the magazine has announced that it’s closing its New York office following the departure of three of its editors.

How much does winning the Pulitzer affect book sales? It makes a difference—Adam Johnson went from selling 413 copies of The Orphan Master’s Son a week before his Pulitzer win to 2,477 in the two weeks after the announcement—but not as much as you’d think. What really makes a difference, as exemplified by a big spike in The Great Gatsby sales, are movie adaptations.

Teaching, editing, advertising: The day jobs of famous novelists.

John Grisham is putting the finishing touches on a sequel to his 1988 bestselling novel A Time to Kill, in which an idealistic white lawyer working in the deep south defended a black man who had killed his daughter’s rapists. Grisham will return to the same town and characters in Sycamore Row, which will come out this fall with Knopf.

And in in job news, political blogger Andrew Sullivan is looking for a personal assistant, and the lazy need not apply: “The job includes everything that you can imagine: from managing my calendar, setting up travel arrangements, dealing with press inquiries, to handling my in-box, helping me manage real estate, occasional dog-sitting and walking, keeping track of my regimen of medications with doctors and insurance companies, and the conventional office-work the job usually entails.”