You can listen to stories by Michel Faber and Roxane Gay over at WNYC’s website. Gay’s piece, which is performed by Adepero Oduye, was recently selected to appear in The Best American Short Stories.
Saturday Fiction with Faber and Gay
Borges’s Best-Of
Jorge Louis Borges’s suggestions for the thirty-three books to begin his famed Library of Babel includes works by Oscar Wilde, Franz Kafka, and even Borges himself–and, maddeningly, no women. Nothing against Borges, but you may want to spend some time with our own slightly more diverse Year in Reading series for a bit more variety.
●
●
E-Books Upend Publishing Class
A Columbia University course that has taught generations of bright-eyed would-be Maxwell Perkins the ins and outs of the New York publishing biz has had to retool its curriculum to account for the e-book phenomenon, the New York Times reports.
●
●
The Real Deal
“Now, I'm not going to lie. It's annoying, to have to take time out of my incredibly busy writing schedule in order to spell it all out for young people, just because they spend most of their daylight hours being urged by hoary old theorists in threadbare sweaters to write experimental fiction that will never sell. But I care deeply about the young—all of them, the world's young—so of course I am humbled and honored to share the trade secrets embedded in my rigorous daily work schedule.” Heather Havrilesky on her writing life.
●
●
Buying The Believer
The Believer was acquired by the Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The magazine will continue to publish bi-monthly, with the first edition under new leadership dropping on August 1st. They're also hiring a managing editor.
●
●
Liberals! Satiricists! Call Out the Big Dogs!
Steve Almond treks deeper into familiar territory in the latest issue of The Baffler, wherein the essayist takes on “our lazy embrace of [Jon] Stewart and [Stephen] Colbert,” an undoubtedly strong “testament to our own impoverished comic standards.” Indeed, Almond notes, our satirists and comics today remain “careful never to question the corrupt precepts of the status quo too vigorously.”