On Monday night Cheryl Strayed, also loved as The Rumpus‘s “Dear Sugar” advice columnist, was celebrated at Housing Works Bookstore. Tiffany Gibert gives us the scoop in the latest installment of #LitBeat.
Wild night
Kesey Documentary
A new documentary on Ken Kesey and his band of Pranksters “presents the LSD-loving pioneers who spawned ’60s counterculture in their own words and images.”
Dead Sea SEOS
Google is pairing up with the Israel Antiquities Authority to put ancient manuscripts, such as the book of Genesis, online.
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Picador Playlists
The gulf between Picador and every other publishing house continues to yawn in one major aspect: literary playlists. To honor the release of Dylan Jones’s Biographical Dictionary of Popular Music, Justin Hargett put together a list of his “Favorite Covered Songs!” (Previously: the “Marriage Playlist” for Jeffrey Eugenides)
The Best of Young Brazil
“Tracing the journey of a mediocre actor and Holocaust survivor ‘touched by some mysterious higher design’ as he forges and impersonates his way through the war and then back to the city of his birth, the story is part Samuel Beckett and part Isaac Bashevis Singer, with a sudden final bolt of O. Henry. It has the flavour of a morality tale, but what’s most fascinating to me is how difficult it is to derive a moral from it, or rather how easy it is to derive more than one and how openly they stand in conflict with each other.” Kevin Brockmeier extols the fiction of Leandro Sarmatz.
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Station Eleven Up for Bailey’s and PEN/Faulkner
Congrats are in order for our own Emily St. John Mandel! As of this morning, Station Eleven has made both the Bailey’s Prize longlist and the shortlist for the PEN/Faulkner prize. For more on the book, you should go read our interview with Emily.
The End of the Gala Era
Peter Osnos on how far the publishing industry has come since the galas and publishing events of the 1990s: “That the action in publishing now is in the creation of books rather than selling the rights to them is a meaningful indicator of the excitement in the industry about the digital potential.”