Philip Roth, who just authorized Blake Bailey to be his official biographer, has written an “Open Letter to Wikipedia” wherein the author states his grievance with the site’s entry for his novel The Human Stain. Related: can we just give this dude the Nobel already?
Philip Roth v. Wikipedia
Great Genes
“My mum is Jerry Hall and my father’s Mick Jagger. People say I have great genes,” says the youngest of Mick Jagger’s children, Georgia May Jagger, in a new Hudson Jeans television ad. See the jeans and genes of this “neo-Bardot” at The Daily Beast.
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Eat Your Heart Out, Fyre
Planning to attend this Saturday’s National Book Festival in Washington, D.C.? The Washington Post has provided five sample itineraries. And for an entirely different, vicarious trip, revisit Mythili G. Rao‘s account of visiting the Jaipur Literature Festival a few years back: “To voice their disapproval of the circumstances of Salman Rushdie’s absence, four writers read from The Satanic Verses — a book that has been banned in India. They were advised to leave. What kind of real intellectual discussion could go on in a setting that had proved itself so hospitable to self-censorship?”
The Art of Stealing
Richard Cohen writes about plagiarizing real people’s identities and the dirty side of writing. As Milan Kundera writes in The Art of the Novel, “The novelist destroys the house of his life and uses its stones to build the house of his novel.”
White Wedding?
Can you be a real feminist if you get married to a man while wearing a white dress and heels?
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The Elements of Style
Alexander Chee invites Ann Beattie, Matt Bell, and five other writers to reflect on the usage of the present tense, “the current preferred mode of the self-taught writer.” Pair with our own Michael Bourne’s essay on grammar and Anthony Doerr.
Everyone Sucks in Some Ways
Is it worth rediscovering Mary McCarthy? All the evidence points to yes.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Oyeyemi; Mengestu; Grand; Hadley; Calhoun; Dillen
Year in Reading alum Helen Oyeyemi has a new novel on shelves this week, as does New Yorker 20 Under 40 honoree Dinaw Mengestu. Also out: Mount Terminus by David Grand; Clever Girl by Tessa Hadley; Black Moon by Kenneth Calhoun and Beauty by Frederick Dillen.
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