At The Morning News, Rooster hosts Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner lay out “The Pre-Game Primer” for the Tournament of Books. The action kicks off tomorrow.
The Rooster is Nigh
Tuesday New Release Day: Didion, Freud, Obreht
This week’s big book release is Joan Didion’s memoir Blue Nights. Also out is Esther Freud’s Lucky Break and new in paperback, Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife (our review).
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Some (Possibly Stale) Links
William T. Vollmann has a new book out, Riding Toward Everywhere about riding freight trains. In what must be a first for Vollmann, the Washington Post describes the book as a “modest little volume.”The New Yorker held a contest to reinterpret Eustace Tilley, its “iconic dandy.” The entries are posted on Flickr.The anxiety brought on by selling books to the used bookstore.The Atlantic website goes free. Everything back to 1995 is available.n+1 interviews a hedge fund manager. It’s surprisingly fascinating (if you skim the technical stuff).Also in the world of big money, a record was broken on Monday. As global markets plummeted, French bank Societe Generale was selling frantically. The bank had just discovered that an employee had fraudulently lost $7.2 billion, believed to be the most ever by a “rogue trader.”
Pimpin’ with Remnick
Correction of the day, courtesy of The New York Times: “He did not say that it would not be a ‘pimped out’ version of the article.”
Lateral Moves
What happens when a literary fiction writer tackles YA? If that writer is Sherman Alexie, he produces an award-winning book that rivals the quality of his books in other genres. At the Ploughshares blog, Annie Cardi writes about writers who’ve made this transition, including Alexie, Roddy Doyle and Louise Erdrich. You could also read our survey of high school students on the best YA books of 2013.
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Neil Gaiman Does TV
Good news for all the Neil Gaiman fans out there–a new, four-part television series called Neil Gaiman’s Likely Stories is set to begin filming in November. The series will focus on a selection of Gaiman’s short stories and feature a singular ensemble cast throughout. This should whet everyone’s appetite for the long-awaited television adaptation of American Gods, which is set to begin production sometime in 2016.
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Jason Epstein on How Publishing Works
“Far more than any other medium, books contain civilizations, the ongoing conversation between present and past. Without this conversation we are lost. But books are also a business….” Jason Epstein explains how publishing works—and why, increasingly, it doesn’t, at the New York Review of Books. (via)
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I Doubt The Authors Would’ve Been Thrilled With This
Deep South Magazine‘s Hunter Murphy compiled a list of “The Greatest Bromances in Southern Literature.”
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Marksonalia
Millions contributor Tyler Malone has created a Tumblr account dedicated to the marginalia of David Markson, whose novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress was famously passed up by 54 publishers before becoming a critical darling.
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