A literary event with an extremely star-studded guest list will be held next month for a good cause. The World’s Most Literary Rent Party Ever will raise money for author Charles Bock’s wife, who is receiving treatment for leukemia, and will include Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Safran Foer, Mary Gaitskill, Joshua Ferris, Rivka Galchen, Amy Hempel, Nicole Krauss, Rick Moody, Richard Price, George Saunders, and quite a few others.
The World’s Most Literary Rent Party
Writing Like a Reader
Over at Catapult, Lynn Steger Strong writes on writing a novel that readers will read. As she puts it, “I was trying to explore the specific experience of living in the world while also living largely, sometimes to one’s own detriment, inside of books, inside one’s head.” Also check out this Millions piece, featuring six writers looking back on their first novels.
Author Internet 101
"I think the key to social media for authors is remembering this: its main purpose is really to show that you are a real human being who lives in this world." Year in Reading alums (respectively) Celeste Ng, Alexander Chee, Roxane Gay, and Adam M. Grant talk to LitHub about how to be a writer on the internet.
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Kafka Papers Overcome Kafkaesque Legal Issues
After a long and complicated drama that played out for five years in Israeli courts, a collection of Franz Kafka and Max Brod manuscripts will be transferred to the National Library in Jerusalem. The unique circumstances at play in this case have been previously written about by Elif Batuman.
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Moneyball Movie Back on Track
The embattled film version of Michael Lewis' baseball bestseller Moneyball, once set to be directed by Steven Soderbergh, is now back on track with Bennett Miller, director of Capote, set to helm. Brad Pitt is still lined up to play Oakland A's G.M. Billy Beane.
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Film Critics, A Dying Breed
The new media revolution has massacred the book review sections at many national newspapers, but it's been just as unkind to movie reviewers. At his Salt Lake Tribune blog, Movie Cricket, SLT film critic Sean P. Means keeps a list of all of the movie reviewers who've gotten the axe.
Fitzgerald Uncensored
F. Scott Fitzgerald was too provocative even for the 1920s. His short story collection Taps at Reveille was never published the way he wanted it to be. When the stories came out in The Sunday Evening Post in the 1920s and '30s, all slang, slurs, and sexual innuendo were edited out. Now, almost a century later, we can read Fitzgerald's original work in a new Cambridge edition.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Smith; Campbell; Moore; Brooks; Marra; Ōe; Niffeneger
Out this week: M Train by Patti Smith; Mothers, Tell Your Daughters: Stories by Bonnie Jo Campbell; 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories edited by Lorrie Moore; The Secret Chord by Geraldine Brooks; The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra; Death by Water by Kenzaburō Ōe; and Ghostly: A Collection of Ghost Stories by Audrey Niffenegger. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview.
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