paper trail

Apr 2, 2013 @ 4:09:00 pm

Paula Fox

The Paris Review is running a series of essays paying homage to Paula Fox, who will be honored at the journal’s annual Revel with the Hadada Prize. The first essay comes from Tom Bissell, who got Fox’s classic novel Desperate Characters back into print while still an editorial assistant at W.W. Norton. According to Bissell, the novel (a tale of cat bites, gentrification, and marital dissintigration set in brownstone Brooklyn) “cuts across generations and aesthetic tastes like no other modern novel I know. Postmodernists love it. I love it. Hipsters love it. Academics love it. Realists love it. My mother loves it. Only a year or two after it was republished, Desperate Characters was being regarded as one of the classic Brooklyn novels, one of the classic American short novels.”

Novelist, critic, and musiciam James Greer is helping Steven Soderbergh adapt John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor into a 12-part miniseries. "Kind of like Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz, but with pirates and whores and venereal disease and bumptious alcoholics and someone in almost every episode soiling his or her (usually his) pants. In other words, almost exactly like Berlin Alexanderplatz," Greer recently wrote in the LA Review of Books.

The AP is dropping the term “illegal immigrant” from their stylebook.

The New Yorker launches “Elements,” a new blog about science and tech, with a piece by Maria Bustillos about the financial crisis in Europe and the future of the electronic currency Bitcoin.

At the Boston Review, Claude S. Fischer pens a long essay about how the number of college-educated women joining the workforce has dropped off since the 1990s; meanwhile, at the New York Times’ Dealbook blog, Andrew Ross Sorkin interviews female executives about the lack of women on Wall Street, and how “the problem of the glass ceiling is matched by... “sticky floor” — that is, women who remain in lower-tier jobs because they don’t proactively try to climb the corporate ladder.”

If you work at a media website like Gawker or Buzzfeed, how much of your job is consumed by tweeting? The Awl crunches the numbers.