What happens to your Facebook account when you die? (Via.)
The Final Status Update
“PV”
After sixteen years of work, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, “the world’s only celebrity translation team,” have finally finished translating all of Tolstoy, ending with last fall’s Hadji Murat. Humanities interviews them, and back in 2009, so did we.
Exhausted by Celebrity
“Readers have grown tired of the slew of celebrity memoirs,” reports The Guardian. “About time,” we say.
Bloggers Sue Huffington Post
A group of bloggers led by Jonathan Tasini have filed a class-action lawsuit against Huffington Post for $105 million, claiming a lack of compensation for their contributions. Tasini hopes to set a precedent for content creators in the digital age.
Byliner Goes Fiction
Byliner, which has made its name with a long-form nonfiction portal and long-form nonfiction ebook originals, is kicking off its Byliner Fiction imprint with Amy Tan’s Rules for Virgins
Weary Old Men
In an excerpt of Out of Time, a new book on “the pleasures and perils of ageing,” author Lynne Segal makes a case that many iconic male writers — among them Philip Roth, John Updike and Martin Amis — display in their works a belief that the slow loss of virility is one of the most tragic effects of growing older for men. Citing passages from Toward the End of Time and Portnoy’s Complaint, she finds evidence that these writers’ depictions of masculinity reveal “obdurate social hierarchies of gender and ageing.” (Related: Keith Meatto on advice you can glean from Philip Roth’s work.)
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Larceny Lit
Recommended Reading: Sarah Gerard records her phone calls with inmate Matthew Seger as he tries to find time to write in prison. “I feel like all of these ideas I have will someday, maybe, be of some use. I don’t want to let any of them go.” We interview Matthew Parker, the author of the graphic memoir, Larceny in My Blood: A Memoir of Heroin, Handcuffs, and Higher Education.
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Tom Hanks, Fiction Writer
Tom Hanks’s debut collection of short stories is due out in October. “The theme of the collection will be typewriters,” reports The Guardian, “with each tale involving one of these more and more scarce machines.”