The New York Times reviews William Gibson’s new novel Zero History: “To read Gibson is to read the present as if it were the future…” Also: Douglas Gorney interviews Gibson for the Atlantic.
William Gibson’s Zero History
Night Shade Books Gets Shady
A publishing flap in three parts, with colons. 1: Publisher’s Weekly details unsettling allegations about Night Shade Books — an unwillingness to answer calls from writers or their agents, stolen digital rights, and missing royalty statements. 2: Night Shade issues an apology. 3: A wronged writer responds.
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Gatsby Rising
What if the zodiac was based not on your birthday but on your favorite book in high school? If it were, and if your favorite book happened to be Lord of the Flies, we could guess that you are currently “researching masters programs and preparing for your fourth Burning Man.”
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Puffed Up
Don’t blame Amazon or Goodreads for authors writing rave reviews of their own work. Writers have been self-promoting since the 1700s, when it was called “puffery.” As Nicholas Mason writes for Symposium Magazine, “Nearly every British writer of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries either participated in or benefitted from ginned-up book reviews.” The list of puffed up authors includes Mary Wollstonecraft, Walter Scott, and Mary Shelley.
Ich bin ein Berliner
The kind souls at NYRB Classics have nicely posted the first story from Robert Walser’s Berlin Stories, “Good Morning, Giantess!” on their Tumblr. The collection got a nice little write up in this weekend’s New York Times, too.
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Pickwick Posts
Joshua Cohen, author of the recently published Book of Numbers, will begin writing a serialized, twentieth-century version of Charles Dickens’ Pickwick Papers live and online next week. Beginning October 12 at 1pm, viewers can watch Cohen spend five days reimagining the book and will be able to offer criticism that may affect the ending.
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Free Poetry!
How would like to receive some free issues of Poetry magazine for your book club? Poetry, by the way, answered our call in our Tumblr round-up and has since joined the platform.
Yea, As If They Know What They’re Doing
Here are some writing tips from Henry Miller, George Orwell, Margaret Atwood, and Neil Gaiman.
The Literary Identity
“Being someone who’s an outsider, there are so many ways in which the world acts on you or assigns narratives to you.” Literary Hub interviews author Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi about literature, identity, and her new novel, Call Me Zebra. From our archives: Nur Nasreen Ibrahim‘s review of Call Me Zebra.
It bothers me that reviewers never write about the increasing elegance of Gibson’s writing.