Two French novelists, two books about dead babies: Literary cat fight, canny PR scheme, or “psychological plagiarism”? Read all about the literary feud that’s captivating France here.
Camille Laurens V. Marie Darrieussecq
I would like to read one from Maury Povich, no lie.
A report from Book Expo America: “Celebrity memoirs will survive Armageddon.”
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A Wasted Life
“I have wasted my life.” Over at the Paris Review, Dan Piepenbring takes a look at James Wright‘s “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” and the many interpretations readers have brought to its famous last line. Among those readers is David Mitchell, who wrote about the same poem in an essay for The Atlantic‘s By Heart series earlier this year.
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Crime and Punishment
Johnny Depp’s latest film, Black Mass, which casts the star as Whitey Bulger, hit theaters on September 18th. At Publishers Weekly, author T. J. English argues that Where the Bodies Were Buried: Whitey Bulger and the World That Made Him is necessary to the canon of literature on Bulger, even if it’s the 16th book about the mobster.
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Hatchet Job
Cutting out large chunks of a book is pretty common, but cutting out 200 pages is a little unusual. While working on his latest novel, Joshua Ferris decided to abandon the elements drawn from crime fiction, which meant he had to toss out a huge portion of his draft. “Now that was a fun day,” he says.
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Kindle Spam is Here
Inevitable: Spam is increasingly cropping up among the self-publishing hordes on the Kindle.
Stephenie Meyer’s Body Snatchers
A mini-excerpt from Stephenie Meyer‘s bestseller for adults, The Host, just out in paperback.
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Dead Men May Tell Tales
“The eradication of Terry Pratchett’s unfinished works, the zeros and ones of his hard drive ground into the earth at the Great Dorset Steam Fair, is an imaginative exception to the rule.” The Paris Review questions how we publish an authors posthumous works and whether there’s a better way to do so. Pair with: our 2017 Select Literary Obituaries.