At The Guardian, Richard Lea talks to Bryan Washington about homophobia, Houston, and his story collection, Lot. “There is no singular experience – there’s no story I could have written that would have encapsulated what it meant or what it could mean to live in the city,” Washington says of his hometown. “And I don’t think there’s any author who’s going to do that, just because there’s such a multiplicity of experiences in this particular city.”
Entertainment Weekly has the trailer for the film adaptation of James Frey’s fabricated memoir A Million Little Pieces.
Molly Young is joining New York Media as the literary critic for New York magazine and Vulture.
The New York Times profiles Waterstones managing director James Daunt. Elliott Advisors, Waterstones’ owner, bought Barnes & Noble earlier this week for $683 million. Daunt, who will serve as CEO for the struggling American chain, plans to turn things around by making the shopping experience more enjoyable. “Frankly, at the moment you want to love Barnes & Noble, but when you leave the store you feel mildly betrayed,” Daunt said. “Not massively, but mildly. It’s a bit ugly—there’s piles of crap around the place. It all feels a bit unloved, the booksellers look a bit miserable, it’s all a bit run down.”
“The original title, which I still stand behind, is Schrödinger’s Marriage,” Taffy Brodesser-Akner told the Maris Review about her recent novel, Fleishman Is in Trouble. “My editor said in our first conversation about the book that you can’t call it Schrödinger’s Marriage because it has an umlaut and you’re setting yourself up for a disaster in a search bar. I thought that this can’t be true, that this is just some institutional thinking. However, even the people who liked the title misremembered it. They would call it like Heisenberg’s Marriage, and I guessed that this was right. You can’t call it that.”