With the erosion of the 175-year-old Times-Picayune, New Orleans will soon be one of the largest metro areas without its own major newspaper publishing every day. Over at The Atlantic, Emily Badger explains the sad saga of its demise as well as the complexities and uncertainties yet to come.
The Paper New Orleans Needs
A Tipping Point for Gladwell Haters?
The Nation expends about 7,500 words to say Malcolm Gladwell is a hack. The source of the umbrage: “a cheerful, conversational voice deployed in a perfectly paced dopamine prose that had the palliative effect of nullifying whatever concerns readers might have about this product or that problem.”
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Samuel Beckett Wears Short Shorts
From the Sentences We Thought We’d Never Write Department: Samuel Beckett shows some leg.
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RIP Doris Lessing
Nobel laureate Doris Lessing passed away last night at the age of 94. The author of The Grass is Singing, The Fifth Child and The Golden Notebook took home the Nobel in 2007 for “subjecting a divided civilisation to scrutiny,” in the words of the prize committee.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Rachman; Card; Winton; Conn; Dugan; Pritchett; Flynn; Yejide
The Imperfectionists author and Year in Reading alum Tom Rachman has a new novel on shelves this week, as does Orson Scott Card. Also out: Eyrie by Tim Winton; O, Africa! by Andrew Lewis Conn; So Much a Part of You by Polly Dugan; Stars Go Blue by Laura Pritchett; Third Rail by Rory Flynn; and Time of the Locust by Morowa Yejide.
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Sandusky on Amazon
The latest entity to get sucked into the Jerry Sandusky pedophile scandal that’s engulfed Penn State? Amazon. Users are leaving angry comments on the site’s comment boards about Touched: The Jerry Sandusky Story, Sandusky’s unfortunately titled 2001 biography.
Short Story Week Links
Did you read a short story today? He did.Samantha Hunt scribbles on bar napkins.Deborah Eisenberg not only writes great stories; she also gives a great interview.A Peter Markus story – free! – at failbetter.com.A Ben Fountain story – free! – at The Barcelona Review.Bookslut chats up Elizabeth Crane.Death is dead (via Conversational Reading).
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Hatchet Job Prize
Turns out Americans aren’t the only ones who adore snark. The novelist and critic Adam Mars-Jones has won the first Hatchet Job prize from the British website Omnivore for his blistering takedown of Michael Cunningham’s latest novel, By Nightfall. Mars-Jones beat out Geoff Dyer’s slam of Booker Prize winner Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending. “It isn’t terrible,” Dyer wrote, “it’s just so…average.”