Elaine Kaufman supported writers at her restaurant when she was alive, and the Table 4 Writers Foundation keeps her legacy going with its grant. The third annual writers’ grants contest will award a $5,000 grand prize and two $2,500 prizes for promising writers. Applications are due by November 15 and can be submitted here. For more on Kaufman, read our own Bill Morris’s tribute.
Table 4 Grant
Uncommon Language
Writing about a foreign country is always a dodgy proposition, but it seems to be especially thorny when English people and Americans take on their transatlantic brethren. Looking over two contributions to the genre by English writers — Terry Eagleton’s Across the Pond and A.A. Gill’s To America With Love — Carlin Romano concludes that neither manages to “teach us something new about ourselves.”
●
●
The End of the Rainbow Room
Is the end nigh for the famed Rainbow Room? Well, if it is, it’ll live on through passages like this one from Alvin Levin’s Love Is Like Park Avenue.
●
●
Murakami’s Latest is Flying Off the Shelves
Haruki Murakami’s latest book – the title of which translates to Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and the Year of His Pilgrimage – went on sale in Japan last month, and in that time it’s been selling over a million copies a week. You can catch a glimpse of the book’s first and earliest reviews over at the NY Daily News. (By the way, did you know Murakami translated The Great Gatsby into Japanese?)
The James Salter Diet
James Salter’s women are “described over and over again as meals for the male protagonists to enjoy and then leave behind in various western European countries,” Lidia Jean Kott argues. Read Sonya Chung’s take in our review of All That Is.
●
●
Blairian
Since his death in 1950, George Orwell has grown more and more popular, so much so that his eponymous adjective is now widely used even by ideological enemies. So how did this state of affairs come about? In the new Intelligent Life, an offshoot of The Economist, Robert Butler delves into the story of how Orwell became an icon. Pair with: Vishwas Gaitonde on his visit to Orwell’s birthplace.
●
●
Techrification
“Another friend of mine told me a story about the Apple bus from when he worked for Apple Inc. Once a driver went rogue, dropping off the majority of his passengers as intended at the main Apple campus, and then rolling on towards San Jose instead of stopping at the satellite location, but the passengers were tech people, so withdrawn from direct, abrupt, interventionary communications that they just sat there as he drove many miles past their worksite and eventually dumped them on the street in a slum south of the new power centre of the world.” In the London Review of Books, a native of San Fran laments her tech-drunk city.
Appearing Elsewhere
Fence has a new web site. And a new fall issue! My story “The Art of Forgetting” appears online, alongside new work by Ariana Reines, Mary Jo Bang, and Thomas Israel Hopkins.