“We live in the age of opinion — offered instantly, effusively and in increasingly strident tones. Much of it goes by the name of criticism, and in the most superficial sense this is accurate.” The New York Times approached six accomplished critics, Stephen Burns, Katie Roiphe, Pankaj Mishra, Adam Kirsch, Sam Anderson, and Elif Batuman to explain, in the spirit of Alfred Kazin, “what it is they do, why they do it and why it matters.”
Why Criticism Matters
Debut Novel from n+1 Co-Editor Brings in Big Bucks
Those who watch the book deal emails from Publishers Lunch know that Chad Harbach, an editor at n+1, recently sold his first novel, The Art of Fielding, but a Bloomberg article today reveals it went for an eye-popping $650,000. The book centers around baseball at a fictional Wisconsin college, and Bloomberg pegs the deal as “one of the highest prices for a man’s first novel on a topic appealing to a male audience.” Possible buried lede: n+1 compatriots Benjamin Kunkel and Keith Gessen saw their first novels sell 48,000 and 7,000 copies respectively, according to Neilsen BookScan.
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Biblieauphilia
The Book Bench comes up with a list of perfumes inspired by novels, from Essence of Mrs. Dalloway to Middlesex Scented Oil.
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Sergio de la Pava Takes Home the Bingham Prize
Congrats are in order for Sergio de la Pava, who just won the $25,000 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award for his debut novel, A Naked Singularity. For more on the novel, which holds an illustrious place in our Hall of Fame, check out our own Garth Risk Hallberg’s profile of the author from last year.
Teju Cole on the Leonard Lopate Show
Something you should hear: Open City author and prolific tweeter Teju Cole on WNYC’s Leonard Lopate Show.
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Mass(ive) Effect
What effect, if any, are video games having on literature? Tobias Carroll at Hazlitt explores the surprising liminal space between video game narratives and literary fiction. This essay from The Millions is a nice complement.
Tom Hanks, Fiction Writer
Tom Hanks’s debut collection of short stories is due out in October. “The theme of the collection will be typewriters,” reports The Guardian, “with each tale involving one of these more and more scarce machines.”
The Long-Awaited Return of Gayl Jones
Gayl Jones published her first novel in 1975. It was hailed by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and John Updike. Then Jones disappeared from the literary scene. Now she's releasing her first novel in 20 years.
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