Hilary Mantel is going from the brutal politics of the Tudors to the Thatcher era. Her next book will be a collection of short stories about Margaret Thatcher called The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher and is due out in September.
The Iron Lady Lit
Pump the longreads at SXSW
Our own founding editor C. Max Magee is teaming up with our friends at The Bygone Bureau and The Morning News to give a panel discussion at SXSW Interactive 2013 on the future of independent longform writing on the web. If you wanna see the panel make it to Austin, head over the SXSW site to give us your vote. You can register to vote here.
●
●
An Ugly Book-Burning Incident in Chicago
In his column in the Chicago Tribune today, Eric Zorn describes a particularly ugly incident that occurred at a library not far from where I live. Somebody set fire to a number of books at the John Merlo branch of the Chicago Public Library. Making matters worse, it appears as though the arsonist targeted the gay and lesbian books section of the library, which itself is located in a neighborhood with a large gay population. From Zorn's column: Staffers detected the fire quickly and used an extinguisher to put it out before anyone was hurt. The library remained open, and if you visit there today, the only reminders of the incident are gaps on several shelves where destroyed books used to sit.But the location makes it a bigger event. For both symbolic and safety reasons, the idea of arson in the stacks, no matter how relatively unsuccessful, is chilling. Public libraries are not only embodiments of liberty but, with all that paper, prospective tinderboxes.More chilling still to many is that the unknown arsonist chose to set the fire in the heart of the Chicago area's largest unified collection of gay and lesbian-oriented books.Zorn explores the topic further at his blog explaining why he decided to devote his column to what was, admittedly, a very minor fire, wondering "Do we not, in some ways, magnify the power of a hate crime when we publicize it?"I'm glad he decided to write the column. Coming on the heels of a book-banning attempt in a nearby school district, it's been a rough couple of months for books in the Chicago area.Update: It turns out it wasn't a hate crime. As Eric Zorn explains, they caught the culprit, a 21-year-old homeless woman who set the fire because "she was angry at library staff for being rude to her."
●
●
This Could Be Big
After winning a $100,000 grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation, what do you do for an encore? How about staging "fifty days of lectures, discussions, and debates" about what the future ought to look like? How about enlisting the likes of Laurie Anderson, Samuel Delany, Rachel Kushner, and Norman Rush as ringmasters? How about having the entire thing take place in structures designed by artists José León Cerrillo and Adrián Villar Rojas? Triple Canopy's "Speculations" occupies MoMA's P.S. 1 this summer
●
●
Dispatch from Wisconsin
Lorrie Moore writes about her home state of Wisconsin and its popular Netflix documentary series Making a Murderer. Also check out the Millions profile of Moore.
●
●
The Ghost of Playboy’s Literary Past
"We editors told ourselves the naked women were merely carnival barkers: they got an audience into the tent, but we kept them with the content." In the Guardian, Playboy's former fiction editor Amy Grace Loyd reveals what it was like to work at the magazine and how she commissioned work from writers like Donna Tartt, Margaret Atwood, and Junot Díaz. Read our review of Loyd's debut novel, The Affairs of Others.