Leslie Jamison and Francine Prose discuss the ways reading can affect your life for the worse, with potential results ranging from murder to being bad at sports.
Reading for the Worse
Plagiarizing James Bond
Little, Brown & Company has pulled a mystery novel from the shelves after passages in the book were found to have been plagiarized from “a variety of classic and contemporary spy novels,” like James Bond novels and books by Robert Ludlum and Charles McCarry.
Effing up The New Yorker
Mary Norris on the cusswords permitted to run in The New Yorker over the years. Sadly, the piece is not titled “Fuck This Shit.“
Tom Stoppard’s Pink Floyd Play
“Sir Tom Stoppard has written a play for BBC Radio 2 to mark the 40th anniversary of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon featuring Bill Nighy and Rufus Sewell.” Huh, so it looks like Stoppard still isn’t slowing down.
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Infinite Boston
Earlier this month William Beutler, a D.C. based writer, started a blog about the landmarks in Boston that inspired the landscape of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Beutler does a great job chronicling the real-life history of different buildings and explaining how DFW altered them to fit into his novel.
OYC to Print
Selections from Open Yale Courses are headed to print. As program director John Donatich explains, “At first glance, you might look at it skeptically and ask why would anybody pay for something that you can get for free. But on second glance you realize that it’s actually not the same thing at all.”
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Hold Off on Your Coronavirus Novel, Please
Has quarantine cabin fever driven you to write a COVID-19-inspired novel? Sloane Crosley kindly asks you to put it aside—just for now.
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