Authors are known to mine material from their personal relationships for their writing, but John Updike found inspiration from his interviews. After journalist William Ecenbarger wrote a profile of Updike in 1983, he found himself the subject of an Updike short story. Pair with: Our review of Updike’s Collected Stories.
Pulling an Updike
Part 3 of Murakami’s 1Q84 coming soon in Japan
Part Three of Haruki Murakami’s massive new novel 1Q84 will be released in April. The novel is expected to be released in English by Random House in Fall 2011. Check out our previous reporting on Murakami’s latest here.
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Not Enough Thrills
There’s no official protocol for responding to a disappointed fan, but that may change after more writers get wind of this response, written by Threats author Amelia Gray, to a man who complained that her book was “nothing more than conversations among insane people.” Gray admitted that the man’s gripe did, in fact, have merit, after which she urged him to buy a copy of A Time to Kill.
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At What Age?
This week in book-related infographics: a look at “What Age Do Writers Publish Their Most Famous Works?” from Electric Literature.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Poehler; Gibson; Faber; Farah; Binchy; Paul
Parks and Recreation star Amy Poehler has a new book on shelves this week, as does William Gibson. Also out: The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber; Hiding in Plain Sight by Nuruddin Farah; a new collection of Maeve Binchy’s Irish Times columns; and a hardcover compilation of entries in the NYT’s By the book series. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great Second-half 2014 Book Preview.
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Killers of the Bidding War
This week in news that’s almost impossible to believe: after an intense bidding war, the rights to David Grann’s upcoming book Killers of the Flower Moon were bought by Imperative Entertainment for a whopping five million dollars. All this for a nonfiction book that isn’t due out for well over a year. Killers of the Flower Moon tells the story of the investigation into the mysterious deaths of several Osage Indians in the 1920s, who were at the time some of the wealthiest people in the world. The case was one of the first ever worked by the FBI.
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Populist Poetics
“What happens when everyone’s a poet?” asked Marjorie Perloff in the Boston Review. Now, Mike Chasar and Jed Rasula debate what that popularity might actually mean for contemporary poetry.
Translated Words
Recommended Reading: Six translators write on the subtle art of translating fiction.