Nearly 300 previously unpublished love letters written by Vladimir Nabokov to his wife Vera Slonim from 1923 to 1975 will be published next year by Knopf.
Nabokov’s Unpublished Letters
Biography: The Story of Our Times
“There is one rule [to writing biography] that all who try their hand at it come to know: until the protagonist reveals his or her character—his or her inner self—what the biographer produces is less a life than a report, an autopsy rather than the record of a séance.” David Levering Lewis writes for The American Scholar about biography and writing “the lives of African-American figures, and [finding] in them the story of our times.”
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Sonya’s Favorite Novel of the Millenium (So Far)
At The Second Pass, check out my review of Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living, an unsung gem of a novel by Australian writer Carrie Tiffany.
Amazon or perish?
ICYMI: After Hachette writers banded together behind their publisher (piles of tweets, an author petition (pdf), a perplexing Malcolm Gladwell YouTube clip, and of course our own Edan Lepucki in Stephen Colbert’s pre-order campaign), Amazon proposed giving authors “100% of proceeds” from ebooks — that’s including Hachette’s share — while they hashed things out. You gotta admire that gumption. Halfway around the world, a French court order just banned free delivery for discounted book orders–so Amazon now charges one cent. Also: they’ve got drones. The Times concludes that if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.
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Learning from Munro
“When, like Alice Munro, you feel your way forward, sniffing and digging and groping toward a truth virtually beyond words, it takes a long time. And the structures, organic to that process, are as miraculous and indicative and expressive of that truth—one of the deeper truths of human life—that fiction is all about.” Elizabeth Poliner explains how mapping Alice Munro’s stories made her a better writer. Never read Munro? Check out our beginner’s guide to her stories.
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#workingonmynovelaboutyournovel
Cory Arcangel‘s Working on My Novel is composed solely of tweets from people who (one is led to assume) are engaged in the singularly tragic enterprise of writing books that, unlike Working on My Novel, will take years to complete, yet won’t be published by Penguin or noticed by The Paris Review. Oh, the meta-irony. And now I’ve just honored it with a Curiosities post.
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Literally crowding the text
Would you buy your way into a novel? For $900 CDN you can determine the title of Daniel Perlmutter’s next book. If that’s a little steep for ya, $15 gets one of your sentences in there.
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Beltway Books
Editors and critics at The Washington Post put together a sixteen-image slideshow of books “to help introduce” our nation’s capital. This seems like the perfect excuse to try out my new favorite thing on the internet: the Slideshow De-Slide-ifier by ClusterFake.
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