Are editors more accessible than ever before? (For what it’s worth, we list our editors’ contact details.)
Why We Can’t Respond To Everything
Stop the presses. Or, rather, restart the presses!
Owing to a successful Facebook campaign and some outcries from the Press’s authors, University of Missouri administrators have decided to reinstate the University of Missouri Press—which was recently shuttered—and “rehire” its editor in chief, Clair Wilcox. The goal now, according to the university system’s president, is to “reinvent [the press] in a more cost-effective technological model.”
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Renata Adler’s Dazzling Hurdles
Gary Indiana posits that “no current literary label appealingly describes the kind of narratives [Renata Adler’s] Speedboat and Pitch Dark are.” This might be true. However in the name of moving forward with discussion, perhaps we can all go with Matthew Spektor’s summation of Adler’s debut novel: “if it’s ‘like’ anything at all, a steeplechase of [dazzling] hurdles could be it.”
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A Debut
Maaza Mengiste, an old school chum, gets high praise from Claire Messud for her debut, the "extraordinary novel" Beneath the Lion's Gaze.
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Not the First Ebenezer
Our own Kevin Hartnett has an interesting theory as to how Charles Dickens came up with the idea for A Christmas Carol. At The Boston Globe, he looks at the evidence that Dickens got inspiration from the amateur writings of millworkers in Massachusetts.
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Marco Roth on Kazuo Ishiguro
In honor of the upcoming film adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, n+1 posts Marco Roth’s compelling review of Ishiguro’s novel and Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island online for the first time.
A Few Last Words
How did Bob Mankoff know something was wrong with Roger Ebert? Because he failed to enter The New Yorker’s weekly caption contest, of course. To honor Ebert’s memory, the magazine published his final cartoon captions.
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New Thomas Pynchon Teaser
Hot off the press: the first page of Thomas Pynchon’s forthcoming novel Bleeding Edge, which is due to hit shelves on September 17.
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