Fox Books has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, The Onion reported. But in reality, Barnes & Noble is facing some big problems, which inspired Michael Agger to write a thank you note to the troubled bookstore. “Going to Barnes & Noble became a Saturday afternoon. It was as if a small liberal-arts college had been plunked down into a farm field.”
“One, Two, Three, Four. We Want this Superstore.”
Poetic Punishment
Following their prosecution for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” against the Russian Orthodox Church, Russian punk group Pussy Riot has been dispatched to correctional colony IK 14. As it happens, the colony is particularly religious. Coincidence? Judith Pallot is skeptical.
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Garrets Etc.
Most writers, unless they’re lucky enough to have an ideal place in which to work, make do with the best space available. For Colum McCann’s father, the shed in his backyard, which “always smelled damp inside, as if the rain rose up out of the carpet,” sufficed for the fiction he wrote after coming home from work. At Page-Turner, the National Book Award winner and Year in Reading alum remembers his father’s retreat.
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Terry Castle
Behold the polymathic mind of Terry Castle, professor, literary essayist, and collage artist. At Fevered Brain Productions, her art blog, see digitally alter photos and collages like “Warthog Proffering Rootbeer,” “She Polarizes People,” “Collage Dramas”, and “Kind Hearts and Coronets.” And from the LRB archives, check out her controversial quasi-eulogy for Susan Sontag, her reviews (for example, Always the Bridesmaid on Yopie Prins‘ Victorian Sappho), and her essays (Travels With My Mom). The Professor, Castle’s forthcoming book of essays, will be published by HarperCollins in January.
The Translation Life Cycle
Recommended Viewing: What actually happens when a book gets translated? Publishing Trendsetter has an infographic of a translated book’s life cycle complete with interviews with a foreign rights agent and a translator.
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Toni Morrison Dies at 88
Novelist of our hearts Toni Morrison died Monday night, her publisher reports, at the age of 88. Morrison won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her best-selling, groundbreaking novel "Beloved," and was the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1993.
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