Anitra Budd will be the next executive director and publisher of Coffee House Press, starting in October. “Since my first day as an intern more than twenty years ago, Coffee House has changed the way I think about words, about art, and about what books can do in the world,” said Budd, who will head the press through its fiftieth anniversary year and build on programming initiatives. To celebrate the news, Coffee House Press is offering 30 percent off on all books through September 1.
Sally Rooney is reportedly only doing one author event to promote her forthcoming book, Beautiful World, Where Are You. Rooney will be in conversation with Emma Dabiri on September 7, in an event hosted by the London Review Bookshop and the Southbank Center. (LitHub notes that this isn’t quite Rooney’s only event, as she’ll also be doing a book signing at Waterstones Piccadilly.)
This week, the Paris Review has lifted the paywall from its 2010 Art of Fiction interview with Louise Erdrich. At one point, the writer talks about why it’s important to her to have control over the cover designs of her books: “On a foreign copy of Tracks there was a pair of massive breasts with an amulet hanging between them. Often, a Southwestern landscape appears. Or an Indian princess or two. A publisher once sent me a design for Master Butchers Singing Club that was all huge loops of phallic sausages. They were of every shape and all different textures, colors, sizes. I showed it to my daughter and we looked at it in stunned silence, then we said, Yes! This is a great cover! I have twenty copies left of that edition, and I’m going to keep them. Sometimes I’ll show one to a man and ask what he thinks of it.”
At Vulture, Alice Bolin writes about works of fiction that use other people’s life stories as material. Bolin discusses Stillwater, a film inspired by Amanda Knox’s case, and Kristen Roupenian’s story “Cat Person,” which takes details from a relationship a woman named Alexis Nowicki had with a man Roupenian also knew.
For the New Republic, Ryu Spaeth reviews Speak, Silence, Carole Angier’s new biography of W. G. Sebald, himself a writer who based many characters in his fiction on people he knew. Spaeth writes: “While I find it hard to square Sebald’s mendacity in real life with the painful honesty of his work—not to mention his scrupulous tact, evident in his steadfast refusal to theatricalize any aspect of the Holocaust—the obfuscation of his sources and the blurring of fact and fiction are crucial to maintaining the integrity of his project. It is the disorienting nature of his books—is this real or not?—that changes our understanding of the past and hence makes it strange and new.”