“A damp, drizzly November in my soul”
Baldwin on the Bosphorus
“He combed through the sahaflar, the second-hand bookshops that line the streets around the Grand Bazaar, their dusty wares stacked on haphazard tables. He sat by the New Mosque, drinking tea out of tulip-shaped cups, playing backgammon, and watching the fishermen’s wooden boats launch into the dirty waters of the Golden Horn.” For Public Books, Suzy Hansen writes about James Baldwin‘s less-well-documented time in Istanbul. Pair with this piece from our pages about the famed author, race, and fatherhood.
Hot Authors
“Author-hot” has historically been a pejorative phrase, or at best faint praise, but Canteen is looking to change that with its “Hot Authors” project, “reinterpreting and reappropriating fashion magazine glam” for the Moleskine set. The redesigned Canteen website also features an interview with yours truly – not, I’m sad to report, included in the “Hot Authors” package.
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What We Need Is
You may have heard about Google Poetics, which compiles Google Autocomplete entries that add up to a Horse_ebooks-like whole. At The Toast, Emma Jones takes these entries and writes them up as poetry proper.
Avian Days
Buying a hawk isn’t the most common grief-coping mechanism, but it worked for Helen Macdonald, who purchased a predatory bird not long after her father passed away. Her new book, H is for Hawk, deals with the experience, in addition to being a falconry manual of sorts. At The Globe and Mail, an interview with the author.
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The Unrealist Novel
Lev Grossman offers some first thoughts on Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, the David Foster Wallace biography written by D.T. Max due out in September. More interestingly, Grossman wonders whether we’re nearing the death of hysterical realism, that manic, maximalist genre James Wood defined in his review of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth.
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Acquiring the Vanities
The New York Public Library just acquired Tom Wolfe’s archives for $2.15 million. They include 190 boxes of drafts, outlines, and research for his articles and books as well as 10,000 letters from the likes of Hunter S. Thompson and Gay Talese. But the library missed the opportunity to get one of his famous white suits because as Wolfe said, “Those are the things I really can’t part with.” Here’s one of our favorite Wolfe essays, “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s.”
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Book Coverage As Premium Content
The Chicago Tribune is rolling out a new premium books section for $99 a year. The Printers Row offering (named for a Chicago neighborhood) “will feature 24 pages of book reviews, author interviews and Chicago-focused literary news, along with a weekly bonus book of short fiction.” You can either feel validated (special HBO-style “premium” section for readers!) or marginalized (so few people care about this that you have to pay extra if you want it.)