A droll diagram mapping the tumultuous birth of a book.
From Pen to Publishing House
“I can’t say that we responded with particular enthusiasm”
In 1998, not long after publishing his first novel, Dan Brown paid a visit to an English class at Phillips Exeter. Among the students in attendance that day was future New Yorker editor Joshua Rothman, whose fragmented recollection of Brown’s appearance turned into an instructive tale about “memory and its tricks.”
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Wild Ride
A lot of women feel a connection to Cheryl Strayed, but one reader’s connection was personal. Strayed’s lost half-sister found her when she just happened to check out Wild because she liked travel narratives. “She didn’t know anything about me except when she read the description in my book of my early life, my mother and my father, she knew that father was hers, too. I don’t name my father in the book but she recognized him,” Strayed told NPR.
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Listen to a Genius
Recommended Listening: David Naimon’s interview with Karen Russell on Between The Covers. You can also find a transcript of the interview in the latest issue of The Missouri Review. Russell just won a MacArthur Genius Grant.
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Jane at 40
The Austen Project, launched last year, asks prominent contemporary writers to reimagine Jane Austen’s classics in modern times. (Thus far, we’ve seen Joanna Trollope’s Sense and Sensibility and Val McDermid’s Northanger Abbey.) In perhaps the most significant adaptation yet, Curtis Sittenfeld has announced that her Pride and Prejudice will feature a 39-year-old Jane Bennet. After all, Jane (23 in the original novel), is “pretty much teetering on the edge of spinsterhood.”
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Protesting Orson Scott Card
With the Ender’s Game movie approaching, critics of Orson Scott Card are drawing attention to the writer’s anti-gay rhetoric. In protest of his position, they compelled DC Comics to scrap a Card-penned Superman comic and started a movement to boycott the upcoming movie. In New York Magazine, Kyle Buchanan runs through the nitty-gritty of the controversy, which includes a recent statement from Card that the repeal of DOMA means “the gay marriage issue” is now “moot.” (You might also want to read our interview with Card from back in May.)
Connected by “And” and “And”
New books of poetry from names like Linda Gregerson and James Tate are always a cause for celebration. Over at the New Yorker, Dan Chiasson takes a look at Gregerson’s Prodigal: New and Selected Poems and Tate’s Dome of the Hidden Pavilion in one extremely thorough essay.