Last October marked the release of a new volume in The Cambridge Edition of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway. Spanning three years in the writer’s early twenties, the letters in the volume track events including his first bullfight, the birth of his son Jack and the publication of his first collection of stories and poems. In The New York Review of Books, Edward Mendelson reads through the new volume. This might also be a good time to read our own Michael Bourne on A Farewell to Arms.
Long and Deep
“Exeunt all, except the Clown.”
Recommended Reading: Mallory Ortberg wrote an entire short story based on stage directions at The Toast.
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Editors on Deck
Adweek engages in a little inside-baseball speculation, wondering who would be in line to take over at, say, the New Yorker if David Remnick were to step down and who might be next in line for Graydon Carter’s gig at Vanity Fair?
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Top Underdog
“[H]e is a true, unrepentant nerd, who has only ever been looking for his people.” Buzzfeed‘s Doree Shafrir talks with Michael Chabon (and his wife, the writer Ayelet Waldman) about being a good literary citizen, his life in letters, and his new “fictional memoir” Moonglow.
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“A Giant Empathy Machine”
“It may be true… that the internet will turn out to be ‘a giant empathy machine.’ And yet, as any reader knows, we’ve already had one for centuries.” Drew Calvert reviews The Novel: A Biography for the Los Angeles Review of Books and provides an argument for the novel in the digital age.
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LMC Revival
Anyone interested in up-and-coming literary magazines should check out HTMLGiant‘s Roxane Gay‘s Literary Magazine Club. The next magazine will be Beecher’s, which has just released its first issue.
“Which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism”
Much fuss was made about Barack Obama’s ex-girlfriends this week, as an excerpt from David Maraniss’ forthcoming Barack Obama: The Story was published in Vanity Fair. Of course, we sophisticated book readers care less about the man’s old flames than we do his literary pursuits, right? That’s why Mr. President’s analysis of T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Wasteland” is so interesting.
Adventures in Publishing
At My Life and Thoughts, Elif Batuman–in delightfully Elifish style–describes her first book travails and unveils a preliminary sketch for the cover of her forthcoming first book The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, drawn by New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast.
The State of Literature in Translation Today
Chad Post ran the numbers to calculate “the state of literature in translation today,” and in so doing he found that AmazonCrossing has been publishing more works of fiction and poetry in translation than any other press except Dalkey Archive. Additionally, the “overall number of works of fiction in translation being published in the U.S. is growing pretty nicely.” To get a full account of what’s coming out this year, check out his 2013 Translation Database.
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