“For a novelist, writing letters is writing that is not writing,” Ed Park says of P.G. Wodehouse’s collected correspondence, A Life in Letters. The Year in Reading alum goes on to note that “a collection of letters is the unconscious narrative the author generates over the years.”
On Wodehouse’s Other Writing
I would like to read one from Maury Povich, no lie.
A report from Book Expo America: “Celebrity memoirs will survive Armageddon.”
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n+1: The Singles
Millions fave n+1 has begun putting out a series of mini-ebooks via Kindle Singles. Three are available thus far: “Octomom and the Politics of Babies” by Mark Grief, “Gatsby in New Delhi” by Siddhartha Deb, and “Argentinidad” by Benjamin Kunkel.
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Scathing ‘New York Times’ Book Reviews
Read some of the harshest New York Times book reviews on literary classics, including Lolita, Ulysses, and The Catcher in the Rye.
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“A history of fire flooding and water flooding”
Not every Craigslist ad is noteworthy, but this property listing, titled “Gorgeous Rural Mountain Acreage” and hailing from Kentucky, is a notable (and sobering) exception. Full-Stop republished the whole thing, which includes warnings that “bears are known to be about” and “beautiful water seeps.”
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Not a Soirée
At The Guardian, Susanna Rustin interviews the Irish writer Edna O’Brien, whose new anthology of stories, The Love Object, comes out as an e-book this week. Among other things, she compares a writer who works on a book for only one day a week with a parent who leaves a toddler unsupervised: “You can’t find it again.”
The First Banned Book in America
Thomas Morton, an English businessman who had a knack for riling up Puritans, was the author of the first book explicitly banned in the United States.
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