Fact: 4 percent of books are written by secret government agencies, while a full .5 percent are authored by helpful elves. How do we know? The New Yorker said so.
Helpful Elves
DFW, ctd.
On Friday, the Ransom Center at the University of Texas-Austin opened up its holdings of The Pale King, DFW’s last novel (which our own Garth Risk Hallberg reviewed for New York Magazine). At Page-Turner, D.T. Max picks through the new papers.
#SalterProblems
“I suppose the truth is I became a little self-conscious about people telling me how much they loved my sentences,” says James Salter in his interview with Jonathan Lee. “It’s flattering, but it seemed to me that this love of sentences was in some sense getting in the way of the book itself.” As it happens, our own Sonya Chung reviewed Salter’s latest book this week, and she, too, remarked on Salter’s desire “to ‘get past the great writer-of-sentences thing,’ and presumably the ‘writers’ writer’ thing.”
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That Old Book Smell Explained
Jude Stewart’s illuminating new book, Revelations in Air, reveals why people are drawn to that “old book smell” and breaks down the chemical reactions involved in producing the scent.
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7x20x21 Recap
If you didn’t make it to BEA this year, first be thankful that you didn’t have to eat any of the food around the Javits Center. Then, check out some of the highlights from the comfort of your desk chair. I recommend Ami Greko and Ryan Chapman’s perennially excellent 7x20x21 panel, which this year featured Nate Silver, Dan Wilbur, and Sheila Heti among others.
O Canada
We celebrated Canada Day a bit early here yesterday with the news that Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize for Literature and our review of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam. So what is Canadian literature exactly? Atwood offered her definition for The Daily Beast: “It’s too multiple [to give a concise definition], but let us say that the point of view (if the writer is not pretending to be American, which they often are) is never that of someone who feels that their country is an imperial power. Because, in fact, Canada is not an imperial power.” You can also see The Handmaid’s Tale at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet next week.
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