- The LBC gets name-dropped by the Inside Google Book Search blog.
- After a too-long hiatus, Tingle Alley is back. Rejoice!
- The seamy underbelly of the celebrity cookbook industry.
Quick Links
Conversations & Connections, 2013
Are you a writer in the Philadelphia area? Are you looking for “a comfortable, congenial environment where you can meet other writers, editors and publishers?” If you answered yes to both of these questions, then this September’s Barrelhouse Conversations & Connections conference will be right up your alley. This year’s keynote speaker will be Familiar author J. Robert Lennon.
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“Made Twilight look like War and Peace”
Herewith, an amazing takedown of Fifty Shades of Grey, spoken by none other than a horrified Salman Rushdie. If a quote like this isn’t a good reason to go to The New Yorker Festival, we don’t know what is.
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Daily Dose of Fiction
101 Words has an ongoing flash fiction series, featuring the works of four writers every Sunday. This week’s edition includes a story by our own Michael Bourne, originally published in Tin House.
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Edinburgh Fringe Festival Joke-Off
Nick Helm took home the Edinburgh Fringe Festival's top humor prize for this groan-worthy joke.
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Goodbye to Brazenhead
Recommended reading: Brian Patrick Eha's goodbye to Brazenhead Books, published in the New Yorker. Pair with J.T. Price's piece on the closing of Brazenhead for The Millions.
Whaleship Essex to Become BBC Documentary
The true story of the Whaleship Essex – which was deftly recounted in Nathaniel Philbrick’s 2000 book In the Heart of the Sea – will soon be adapted into a 90-minute documentary for the BBC. As avid whale watchers already know, the plight of the Essex is what ultimately inspired Herman Melville to write Moby-Dick. You can get an overview of the disaster at Melville House’s blog, Moby Lives. (How appropriate!)
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Baldwin on the Bosphorus
“He combed through the sahaflar, the second-hand bookshops that line the streets around the Grand Bazaar, their dusty wares stacked on haphazard tables. He sat by the New Mosque, drinking tea out of tulip-shaped cups, playing backgammon, and watching the fishermen’s wooden boats launch into the dirty waters of the Golden Horn.” For Public Books, Suzy Hansen writes about James Baldwin's less-well-documented time in Istanbul. Pair with this piece from our pages about the famed author, race, and fatherhood.
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Foul Swine
Somehow we knew that Gary Shteyngart had a pretty interesting childhood. As Andy Borowitz explains in a review of Little Failure, the author’s new memoir, the elder Shteyngart regaled his son with “outlandish” stories, most notably “a sci-fi saga about a Jewish planet under constant attack by volleys of pork.” You can learn what the author likes to read today in his Year in Reading piece.