New Yorker editor David Remnick‘s biography of President Obama will be released April 6, with a first printing of 200,000. Details at PW.
Remnick on Obama: The Bridge
The Birth of the Ellipsis
A Cambridge professor has identified the earliest use of the ellipsis in English literature. Find out more at The Guardian. Sam Anderson reminds us that ellipses are good in moderation through an examination of Dan Brown’s Inferno.
The Banal, Unexceptional Recovering
“So much of recovery is a fight against exceptionalism—that necessary act of saying, What I’ve lived has been lived before, will be lived again, is nothing special but still holds meaning, still holds truth.” Chris Kraus interviews Leslie Jamison about recovery, memoir, and her forthcoming title, The Recovering, for The Paris Review. Pair with: our interview with Jamison.
How to Seem (Or Be) Well-Read
“The easiest way to appear to be well-read is to socialize exclusively with uncultured cretins, which simply won’t do, so instead you should subscribe to the New York Review of Books and read it religiously, committing to memory one idea from each piece and praying to achieve a casual air when, at a dinner party, fobbing off this insight as your own.” Advice from Slate on how to appear well-read, with some bonus advice on how to actually become well-read, just for good measure.
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“It is true that if there exists a ‘writer’s writer,’ [George] Saunders is the guy”
Joel Lovell profiles George Saunders for The New York Times, and he gives a killer endorsement for Saunders’s latest book, Tenth of December. The author’s collection from thirteen years ago, Pastoralia, was picked on our site as being among the “Best of the Millennium.”
Some Dry Reading Material
Wednesdays, right? Well, make your Hump Day a little more productive by perusing the digitized Dead Sea Scrolls. (via)
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Writing in the Motor City
Is Detroit the new Brooklyn? Two Brooklyn writers relocated to the Motor City and are trying to turn the city into a writers’ haven with the project “Write A House.” The non-profit will award free, renovated houses in Detroit to writers of modest means.
at the utmost limits of writing itself
Christian Bök wonders about the future of conceptual poetry:”How do we write poems in a world where a spambot, like @horse_ebooks, gets to write all the great lines…?”
Hmmm, how do you write a biography of Obama AND edit The New Yorker at the same time? Can you be much more than a figurehead as editor under such circumstances?