The Paris Review and the 92nd Street Y have long collaborated on a series of onstage conversations with prominent authors. Now, these talks are going to be made available online as part of 92Y’s Poetry Center Online, and also on the Review’s website. Kicking off the first round of videos are talks with Garrison Keillor, Iris Murdoch, and William Styron. Look out in the coming months for more audio with the likes of Maya Angelou, Jamaica Kincaid, and Allen Ginsberg. (Bonus: 92Y has been adding heaps of content to its digital archive all month.)
New Collaboration Between 92Y and The Paris Review
After the last word
This weekend–at 2:30 am on Saturday, to be precise–Twitter bot @everyword was set to complete its 7-year run with the final word in the English language: “zymurgy.” Unexpectedly, the bot tweeted again half an hour later–with a nontraditional character it had surreptitiously glossed on the first run: éclair. Since @everyword, like Lazarus, probably won’t get the same fuss after its second death, check out The Guardian’s interview with creator Adam Parrish now.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Feldman; Thornton; Akhtiorskaya; La Seur; Bloom; Harkaway
Out this week: The Angel of Losses by Stephanie Feldman; Charleston by Margaret Bradham Thornton; Panic in a Suitcase by Yelena Akhtiorskaya; The Home Place by Carrie La Seur; Lucky Us by Amy Bloom; and Tigerman by Nick Harkaway (which I wrote about for our Great 2014 Book Preview).
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“Neither word exactly conjures security”
You may have heard that Vulture editor Adam Sternbergh was nominated for an Edgar Award for his book Shovel Ready last week. Now, to give Vulture readers a taste of his literary style, he’s published an annotated excerpt of the sequel Near Enemy, which came out earlier this month. As the introduction puts it, the excerpt includes “thoughts on history’s first murder, the dubious appeal of Pepé Le Pew, and just how crazy New York apartment locks used to be.”
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Not as Scary as Meeting Norman Mailer
Readers of The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature most likely have a good idea of just how much the late Norman Mailer was a wellspring of jokes about writers. The pugilistic novelist, journalist and failed mayoral candidate did choose to title a collection of his work Advertisements for Myself, after all. Yet as Andrew O’Hagan notes in the LRB, it’s hard not to admire the cojones on a guy who once told a prominent editor he was “still too young and too arrogant to care to write the kind of high-grade horseshit you print in Harper’s Bazaar.”
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