Deborah Eisenberg has won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg. (Eisenberg profiled at The Millions.)
Eisenberg Wins the PEN/Faulkner
Tuesday New Release Day: Evison, Oates, Theroux, Fontane
New this week is Jonathan Evison’s West of Here, Joyce Carol Oates’ memoir A Widow’s Story about the death of her husband (this was the source of her recent, quite moving essay in the New Yorker), and the expanded rerelease of Alexander Theroux’s The Strange Case of Edward Gorey. Also new on shelves from NYRB Classics is Irretrievable by Theodor Fontane, with an introduction by Phillip Lopate, who discussed Fontane in our Year in Reading in December.
Sorkin Takes on Steve Jobs
The Social Network writer Aaron Sorkin has signed on to adapt a biopic about Steve Jobs (not to be confused with the Ashton Kutcher one) which will be based on Walter Isaacson’s biography of the same name. Meanwhile, as the news was announced, Sorkin gave a memorable commencement address at Syracuse University.
●
●
“New” Zora Neale Hurston
The Chronicle of Higher Education analyzes three short stories by Zora Neale Hurston never before reprinted.
●
●
Good Guy Google
Google is partnering with The HALO Trust in order to use its Google Earth Pro technology to detect and remove land mines in areas like Cambodia and Angola.
The Invention of the Emoticon :(
If you thought the English language went downhill when the emoticon was introduced, you can blame a 17th-century poet. Editor Levi Stahl found that English poet Robert Herrick used the first emoticon in his 1648 poem “To Fortune.” As Herrick writes, “Tumble me down, and I will sit/ Upon my ruines (smiling yet :)” For more on the potential ruin of language, read Fiona Maazel’s piece on commercial grammar.
●
●
Book(case) Criticism
Dispirited by the deluge of advance review copies and publishing mailers (a plight to which I can relate), Ron Charles decided to forego traditional book criticism for the time being and instead to focus on reviewing something more immediately practical: a bookcase.
●
●
Carol Hughes to Write Memoir
Ted Hughes’s widow, Carol Hughes, intends to write a memoir about her marriage to the former poet laureate.
●
●