Little, Brown & Company has pulled a mystery novel from the shelves after passages in the book were found to have been plagiarized from “a variety of classic and contemporary spy novels,” like James Bond novels and books by Robert Ludlum and Charles McCarry.
Plagiarizing James Bond
Curiosities: the Department of Dead Horses
Tranquility by Attila Bartis is named winner of the inaugural Best Translated Book Award. Scott rounds up some reviews and background on the book.Video: Tom Perrotta on the state of American literary culture.”Art History books are full of errors.” This one is about La Raie Vert [the Green Stripe] from 1905 by Henri Matisse.Perfect for the cubicle: Five Chapters serialized John Cheever’s short story, “Of Love: A Testimony,” in bite-sized portions.Mark Sarvas (re)launches the Three-Minute-Interview series, starting with Plimpton Prize winner Jesse Ball. We reviewed Ball’s debut Samedi the Deafness last year. Ball’s new book is The Way Through Doors.Meanwhile, Sheila Heti chats up Mary Gaitskill.Yearbook photos of politicians: Mike Huckabee, How YOU doin’?Norman Mailer and William Styron conduct an epistolary friendship.The Nation revisits the ever-popular subject of Kafka and his critics.Wyatt Mason and friends parse Joseph O’Neill to within an inch of his life.Reif Larsen is this year’s Million Dollar Baby.And, from the Department of Dead Horses and Guys Kicked While Down, we bring you this…
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New Rooms
Roald Dahl’s estate has released a 1961 draft chapter of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The draft reveals a number of little-known characters the author later excised from the book. It also reveals that, at one point, the story featured as many as 10 golden tickets. The Guardian has the draft chapter in full.
The Golden Age of Women Essayists
The essay is more popular than ever. At Salon, Michele Filgate talks to Leslie Jamison (author of The Empathy Exams, here’s our review) and Roxane Gay (author of the forthcoming Bad Feminist) about the power of the genre. Gay believes our interest in essays is because of a “cultural preoccupation with the exposure of the self.” They also discuss if we’re in a golden age of women essayists. “Sometimes when men write about private feeling, it’s seen as exploratory or daring, and when women write about private feeling it’s seen as limited or in the vein of a kind of circumscribed emotional writing,” Jamison says.
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The Case of Portnoy v. Feldman
At the Jewish Daily Forward, Neal Pollack — he of The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature — takes on the retirement of his “contemporary,” Philip Roth.
The Declining Agony of Influence
According to a study cited in The Guardian, contemporary authors are less likely to be influenced by classic literature than previous generations of writers.
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Wikipedian in Residence
The British Library wants to pay someone £15,384 to edit an online encyclopedia for six months. They’re looking for a “Wikipedian in Residence.” Can anyone get Nicholson Baker on the line?
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