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
Four Hours of Chekhov
Recommended listening: Radio Open Source has been broadcasting Anton Chekhov's short stories, with voices including Chekhov translator and biographer Rosamund Bartlett, author Andre Dubus of House of Sand and Fog, and numerous other writers, actors, and scholars. "Chekhov makes you want to be a better person. He makes you want to live a better life." (Unpersuaded? Consider our essays on why reading Chekhov, unlike booze or smokes, will make you a better person in 2014.)
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An Oral History of Oral Histories
Last week, I called 2011 "the year of television's oral history" because of the bevy of recently published oral history books. As it turns out, the explosion is part of a trend, as Michaelangelo Matos notes in this piece for The Daily.
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The Corset Cause
Recommended Reading: The Paris Review has put its Zadie Smith short story "Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets" online. "New York just expects so much from a girl—acts like it can’t stand even the idea of a wasted talent or opportunity. And Miss Adele had been around."
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Tar Pit Blues
Recommended Reading: Alexander Aciman on Canto 22 of Dante’s Inferno. (His essay is part of a series I’ve written about before.)
Sex Appeal
You may remember the brouhaha surrounding Bustle, the first website in history to market primarily to women. Now, in this week’s New Yorker, Lizzie Widdicombe profiles the website, which she describes by pointing out that “[its] articles are modest, but the ambitions of its founder, a young Silicon Valley entrepreneur named Bryan Goldberg, are not.”
Huh. Who Knew?
“The Mariko Aoki phenomenon is a phenomenon consisting of the urge to defecate while visiting a bookstore. Originating in Japan, it is named for the woman who first publicized such an urge.”
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Finding the Fairy Tale Capital
Where is the fairy tale capital of the world? Atlas Obscura investigates. We write about the problem with fairy tales.
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Which Author Spells The Best?
The Council of Literary Magazines and Presses is hosting their annual Spelling Bee Fundraiser on October 30th. New Yorker editor Ben Greenman will host the event, which will pit Jonathan Ames, Amor Towles and Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures author Emma Straub against one another (and more) in a battle of lexicographic perspicacity. (Can you state the language of origin, please?) The event will be judged by none other than Jesse Sheidlower, editor of the inimitable Oxford English Dictionary.