‘The scent is, in a word, newsy’
“Time is the substance from which I am made.”
Yesterday was Jorge Luis Borges‘ 112th birthday, and you can celebrate belatedly by reading his Paris Review interview and his treatment in The New York Review of Books.
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“To look worse after a haircut”
Come on, admit it: you wish English speakers had a word for “one who shows up to a funeral for the food.”
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Books of New York
Martin Scorsese is finally making a movie without Leonardo DiCaprio. He and David Tedeschi are working on a documentary about The New York Review of Books. It will cover the publication’s history and feature new footage of Joan Didion and Michael Chabon, among others. The film is a work in progress but will premiere at Berlinale next month.
Say What?
If you’ve ever heard that literary skill is synonymous with a good memory, you’ve likely bemoaned your own forgetfulness, especially when it comes to important things. Tim Parks felt the same way, until he read a new book on forgetting, which led him to wonder how much knowledge we can retain. In The New York Review of Books, he tackles the paradox of the reader’s memory. You could also read our own Mark O’Connell’s review of Parks’s book Italian Ways.
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We Asked For It
Sinclair Lewis tried to warn us and we didn’t listen–it can always happen here. Over at The Literary Hub, this piece takes a look at Lewis’s 1935 political novel It Can’t Happen Here as a mirror for Donald Trump’s unlikely rise to political superstardom.
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Economics of the E-Book
The Wall Street Journal reports how literary authors are feeling the pinch in the age of e-books: “The upshot: From an e-book sale, an author makes a little more than half what he or she makes from a hardcover sale.”