paper trail

Jul 3, 2013 @ 12:20:00 am

As part of a project for the Stockholm museum Magasin 3, for the next twenty weeks, anybody can sign up to receive free weekly emails from Miranda July on topics ranging from love to personal finance. Though the emails are sent by July, each contains forwarded messages written by participants (including Catherine Opie, Lena Dunham, and Kareem Abdul-Jabar) to friends and acquaintances, giving the project an intimate and strangely voyeuristic feel. The first installment was sent out on July 1, and it included correspondence between Sheila Heti and Helen Dewitt, and between Etgar Keret and a man known only as “Pierre.” Explaining the project, July remarked, “I’m always trying to get my friends to forward me emails they’ve sent to other people....How they comport themselves in email is so intimate, almost obscene ....WE THINK ALONE has given me the excuse to read my friends’ emails and the emails of some people I wish I was friends with and for better or worse it’s changed the way I see all of them.”

Last year, a young writer got international attention after sharing an anecdote about how Philip Roth advised him to give up writing in the Paris Review; this week, memoirist Periel Aschenbrand has also tried to cash in on Roth by publishing an account in Salon of how she almost—but didn’t—sleep with the New Jersey novelist. We’re with Flavorwire’s Jason Diamond in his response to the Rothomania: a blog post titled “Nobody Cares About Your Philip Roth Memories.”

Most people have been busy focusing on the Department of Justice's e-book price-fixing suit against Apple (which Laura Miller has very lucidly analyzed over at Salon), but this week many were reminded of a lawsuit against Google Books, in which the Author's Guild has attempted to stop Google's massive library-scanning project. On Monday, Google won a significant victory, when federal appeals court rejected the decision to give the Authors Guild's suit class-action status.

The Rock Bottom Remainders—a '60s cover band made up of Stephen King, Amy Tan, Dave Barry, and other name-brand writers—broke up in 2012, but they’re immortalizing their work together with an interactive e-book.

Not long after laying off it’s entire photo department, the Chicago Sun-Times has axed its books section. Books editor Teresa Budasi says that the paper will continue to cover books, but will focus more on local authors.

And in other depressing book news, one of Los Angeles’s oldest bookstores, the Williams’ Book Store, is closing after 104 years in business, because the owners can no longer afford to keep it open.