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
Michael Chabon Loves The Phantom Tollbooth
Michael Chabon journeys to the Lands Beyond in his introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of The Phantom Tollbooth, readable over at the NYRBlog.
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Miles Klee Gets Interviewed All Over the Place
Ivyland author (and enthusiastic Tumblr-er) Miles Klee was interviewed by Matt Hackett, and a snippet was posted on Tumblr’s new Storyboard blog. If you like what you see, you can get even more from Klee courtesy of his recent Other People Podcast with Brad Listi.
Fiction by Wes Anderson
Before making films, Wes Anderson used to write fiction. His university literary journal Analecta posts a short story he wrote as an undergraduate in 1989. Did he make the right career choice? (via The Paris Review Daily)
Do You?
Whitney Houston, Adele, Kanye West, Prince, and Justin Bieber all share something in common when it comes to the songs they sing. Each one of them rhymes “do” and “you” more often than any other pair of words. In fact, according to Ben Blatt, that duo is the most commonly rhymed pair in the history of pop music.
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Bookshelf of the Masses
From Jared Fanning, a charming graphic of the world’s 10 most read books.
More dispatches from what will undoubtedly go down in history as the Great Pulitizer Prize For Fiction Brouhaha of 2012:
The Tournament of Books team over at The Morning News have posted an in depth commentary on this year’s withheld Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The Wall Street Journal asks a handful of book critics to name the books they thought should’ve won. And over at Moby Lives, Nick Davies has rounded up the statements made by the jury in response to the brouhaha. Lev Grossman, on the other hand, outlines why he’s totally okay with the board’s decision. And of course, we’ve got links and excerpts for all the finalists over here.
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