At the Morgan Library in NYC: “A Woman’s Wit: Jane Austen‘s Life and Legacy.” Read the NY Times review of the show here. And, if your hankering for eighteenth and early nineteenth century English art isn’t sated by the Austen, the Morgan is also offering “William Blake‘s World: ‘A New Heaven Is Begun'”.
Jane Austen in New York
Wicked Lovely
Variety reports that Universal Pictures has purchased the film rights to Melissa Marr‘s YA fantasy novel Wicked Lovely. Edward Scissorhands screenwriter Caroline Thompson is to adapt the book about a young girl pursued by the king of the fairies. As far as king-of-the-fairies movies go, I’m more interested in what’s happened to the film adaption of Susanna Clarke‘s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, whose film rights were purchased in 2004.
●
●
The Best of the Best
Theoretically, it pays to get a novel on Amazon’s best seller list. In reality, though, a bestselling novel doesn’t make as much in cold hard cash as you’d think.
●
●
From word nerd to language animal
David Mitchell, when questioned about his language and genre experiments, particularly in Cloud Atlas and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, responds: “It’s a bit like asking a duck billed platypus if it should be considered a mammal or a bird.” The Millions also profiled Mitchell, though we never settled either way on the bird/mammal issue.
●
●
The Rise of the Typo
In the Times, Virginia Heffernan bemoans how technology and the economic struggles of the publishing industry are leading to an increasing number of typos in books. However: “The Pollyannish upside to writerly inattention and cutbacks in publishing, then, is that readers sometimes see more of the human writer, and less buff and polish.”
●
●
Sartre and the Nobel Prize
50 years and 1 day ago Jean-Paul Sartre turned down the Nobel Prize in Literature. Yesterday Steve Neumann wrote for The Airship about what writers can learn from Sartre’s refusal.
●
●
The Verdict Is In!
Hurry over to the Tournament of Books to see whether Open City or The Sisters Brothers was this year’s big winner!
●
●