The NY Daily News sat Other People Podcast‘s Brad Listi down for an interview, and thus answers the question of “who interviews the interviewers.”
Brad Listi Finally Gets Interviewed
Another book, another ghost
Oh, ghostwriter: that poorly-paid name snuck into the “Acknowledgements” section somewhere after agent’s agent and ex-wife’s third cousin. In the middle ground between Michael D’Orso, who spoke to The Millions of job satisfaction as a hired pen, and Sari Botton, whose reminisces are full of horror stories, Andrew Croft, author of 80 books that sold 10M copies under other people’s names, offers a circumspect take in his Guardian profile. “The ghost is advised never to forget that, at the end of the day, he or she ranks somewhere between a valet and a cleaner.”
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Print Culture
“At its core, the New York newspaper strike was a battle over technology. The 1950s and 1960s saw the emergence of computerized typesetting systems that would revolutionize the newspaper composing room…Today, new technology is again shaking American newspapers as the Internet drains away more and more advertising revenue. Cities with dailies may soon face a newspaper blackout much darker than what New York experienced a half-century ago. For a brief period, New York was a laboratory that demonstrated what can happen when newspapers vanish,” writes Scott Sherman at Vanity Fair.
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DFW Roundup
From the person who brought you Infinite Boston comes Infinite Atlas, an interactive map of the places that make up Infinite Jest, and, for the truely devoted, the Infinite Map, a framable print version of that atlas. Page-Turner offers an extended preview of D.T. Max’s Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story. Maria Popova highlights a few of the signature DFW words that he adopted from his mother.
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Geoff Dyer on Novelistic Essays and Essayistic Novels
Need to kill 37 minutes? Check out “The Novelistic Essay and the Essayistic Novel,” a lecture by Geoff Dyer from this past year’s Key West Literary Summit. (h/t Mark O’Connell)
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Searching for the Female Huck Finn
Where’s the female counterpart to Ishmael or Sal Paradise, Vanessa Veselka asks. “When a man steps onto the road, his journey begins. When a woman steps onto that same road, hers ends.”
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Happy Birthday, Baldwin
Yesterday was James Baldwin’s birthday. Revisit “Stranger in the Village” or Justin Campbell’s essay on fatherhood and Baldwin in celebration of his life.
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Out There
Some writers find their voices by heading off to Europe. Others (like Thoreau in Walden) head off to the woods instead. At The Rumpus, David Biespiel writes about the year he moved to Vermont, and what it meant to see himself as “leaning into” his youth. Pair with our own Anne K. Yoder on Ken Kesey and the Oregon coast.