This may be a temporary thing, but David Foster Wallace’s posthumously published novel The Pale King appears to be shipping now from Amazon, more than two weeks ahead of the official tax day publication date. Update: From the official Pale King Facebook page: the book “doesn’t have a one day laydown: stores can sell it as soon as it’s in their shop.” So looks like the book is now available everywhere. Do you have your copy yet?
The Pale King Is Shipping
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Get Your Poetry On
Danielle Pafunda celebrates her daylong reign over the Academy of American Poets’ Twitter feed with a cento contest: She tweets the lines, you compose the poem, and three winners take home a selection of signed books written by these contest judges.
“Norman was the very antithesis of minimalism”
Apart from calling up visions of a Carver–Mailer axis of literary minimalism, these remarks by Joyce Carol Oates upon winning the Mailer Prize convince us that Mailer had quite the unflappable ego.
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Reading As Punishment
First a judge ordered a man to write a book report, and now Brazil is offering inmates sentence reductions for every book they read. When did reading shift from pleasure to punishment?
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Trading Camp Fires for Factions
First there was The Hunger Games summer camp, and now there will be a Divergent theme camp in Naperville, Illinois. Camp Divergent will feature activities based on the five factions, such as brain teasers on Erudite day and planting vegetables on Amity day. Don’t worry; no one will be ziplining off of a skyscraper for Dauntless.
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Maybe This Is Why They Take So Long to Finish
Robert A. Caro, who releases new installments of his Lyndon B. Johnson biography at a glacial pace, is apparently also working on another project, too. It’s “not a memoir, exactly,” he says, but it does concern “how he came to write the Johnson biography and its predecessor, The Power Broker.”
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Well-Mannered
Apart from being one of America’s most eminent fiction writers, Eudora Welty was also an accomplished photographer, as evidenced by the hundreds of images she produced while employed by the Works Progress Administration in the midst of the Great Depression. As Danny Heitman writes, she was also known as a great public speaker, in part because, as she put it, “I’m always on time, and I don’t get drunk or hole up in a hotel with my lover.” (h/t The Paris Review)
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Molecular Language
Recommended Reading: Justin Taylor on Sam Lipsyte’s The Fun Parts and how “attention to language at the molecular level” creates a better experience reading and writing. Pair with our review of Taylor’s Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever.
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I have my copy, although it’s a review copy directly from the publisher. The ship date on my Amazon pre-order is supposedly today or tomorrow.
The ship date on mine is also today– for those in NYC and willing to resist the temptation of Amazon’s discounts, St. Mark’s Books was selling them last night…)
Wow, Hachette, way to screw independent bookstores (many of which are planning big release day parties for The Pale King) out of sales by shipping to Amazon first.
Rachel, as you’ll see from the comment above yours, it appears that Hachette shipped to ALL bookstores ahead of the listed pub date, including indies like St. Mark’s Books in NYC.
But the bookshops that announced release day events are still screwed; they have the copies, but likely would have sold more if there had been a true release date. So: What Rachel Said.
Dreezer, that is true. Hadn’t thought about that.
I work at an indie, and I understand our books shipped today and will be here next week. So yeah, we can sell before the 15th, but not as early as Amazon.
But do you think there are really many people buying it this early from Amazon who hadn’t already pre-ordered it and wouldn’t be buying it in-store anyway?