Prospero, the new arts and culture blog of The Economist, has just posted my piece on literary Brooklyn, which explains how New York’s trendiest borough has become a vertically integrated factory for the production of fiction and poetry.
Appearing Elsewhere
I’m Not Dead Yet!
Some corners of the literary world were confused last week when news hit about the passing of Beatles producer George Martin, forcing Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin to make this statement: "While it is strangely moving to realize that so many people around the world care so deeply about my life and death, I have to go with Mark Twain and insist that the rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated. It was Sir George Martin, of Beatles fame, who has passed away. Not me."
When A Critic Becomes An Author
Vanity Fair talks to renowned book critic Michiko Kakutani about her debut The Death of Truth and why she decided to become an author.
The Men Who Stare at Goats
What would the child of The Big Lebowski characters The Dude (Jeff Bridges) and Walter Sobchak (John Goodman) look like? Maybe like Lt. Col. Django (Bridges, again), one of the characters in Grant Heslov's The Men Who Stare at Goats, set to release in November, a comedy about the U.S. military's attempt to train psychic soldiers (based on the book by Jon Ronson).
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“I left him unfinished”
Recommended Reading: “Man Hole” by Natalie Eilbert.
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Scared of the Dead
“Scared of the living, scared of the dead, and even more scared of the dead who are immortal.” Chinese censors have cracked down on social media sites following the death and hushed burial-at-sea of writer and Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo last week, reports The New York Times.
Inseparable
Male bonding can take many forms, among them the rarely-seen joint book tour, which Mike Harvkey and Josh Weil decided to undertake in support of their new novels. The two write about meeting each other, travelling around America and bouncing ideas off trusted friends in a Salon essay. FYI, our own Bill Morris wrote a piece about his own book tour for The Daily Beast.
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The larger question here should be, what kind of impact is this consolidation of writers into one burrough of one city having on American lit as a whole? I.e., is this a good thing?
Personally the last thing I want to read right now is another New York novel by the editor of some Brooklyn lit mag published by a friend of his Park Slope neighbor. Yet these keep popping up.
I’d argue this sort of insularity diminshes quality – the focus seeming to be living a hip writerly life in a hip writerly neighborhood instead of, you know, writing a damn good book. Let’s not forget this Brooklyn “factory” (and “factory” is quite appropriate) spit out a book called “All The Sad Young Literary Men”. How anyone would want to read a novel with that insufferable title is beyond me.
I’m not saying everything coming out of NYC these days is bad. Not true. But there’s much more interesting work being published in Chicago (Dalkey, U. Chicago) and Minneapolis (Graywolf, Milkweed, Coffee House), just to name
two. And I don’t think it would hurt for all these NY-based writers, editors, publishers, etc. to get the hell out of Brooklyn once in a while and see how the rest of our grand huge weird country lives.
Heh:
http://www.theawl.com/2012/06/the-economist-on-brooklyns-literary-renaissance