Rachel Cantor’s pub day for Good on Paper (included in our first-half preview) was this Tuesday. Check out an excerpt from the novel at Lit Hub.
Excerpt from Good on Paper
Chance Meetings
In 1817, the painter Robert Benjamin Haydon invited several guests over for what he called an “immortal dinner.” Why the bombastic name? The guests included Keats and Wordsworth, whom Haydon wished to introduce to each other. In the WaPo, Michael Dirda takes a look at The Immortal Evening, a new book about the event by Stanley Plumly.
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Tribute
“Once [Jenny] Diski did get going as a writer, she and [Doris] Lessing agreed to a kind of literary nonaggression pact: Lessing would not write about Diski if Diski would not write about Lessing. Even now, I sensed a note of anxiety in Diski’s attitude toward her current project. When I asked her if she had any titles in mind for the finished work, she said: ‘Gratitude.’ Or: ‘Ingratitude.’ I can’t decide which.’”
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Filming in the Fourth Dimension
Guillermo del Toro’s next film will bring us to Tralfamadore. He is adapting Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five with Charlie Kaufman writing the script. “I love the idea of the Tralfamadorians to be ‘unstuck in time,’ where everything is happening at the same time. And that’s what I want to do,” del Toro told The Daily Telegraph.
Zadie Smith on The Social Network
“Why Facebook? Why this format?… The striking thing about the real Zuckerberg, in video and in print, is the relative banality of his ideas concerning the ‘Why’ of Facebook. He uses the word ‘connect’ as believers use the word ‘Jesus,’ as if it were sacred in and of itself…” Zadie Smith considers “Generation Why” and The Social Network at the New York Review of Books. Our own review of The Social Network by Sonya Chung can be found here.
A Worthy Prize
The New York Public Library has named five finalists for its inaugural Harriet Tubman prize, which recognizes non-fiction books that explore the topic of slavery. You may also want to revisit our own Edan Lepucki‘s essay from a few years back on slavery in fiction.
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