“If you lack a competent distributor down here, then consider me at your service. Nothing would make me happier than to drive Salems off the market for good and ever. It’s without a doubt the foulest cigarette in the history of tobacco-addicted man—a tasteless mish-mash of paper and dry weeds.” Boy, Hunter S. Thompson really hated Salems.
Kool As the Other Side of the Pillow
Splendid, Vibrant
Recommended Reading: Tolu Ogunlesi on how “Nigeria’s literary scene has burgeoned into this splendid, vibrant space.”
Use It Or Lose It
At least two people were not pleased with John Jeremiah Sullivan’s recent cover story in the New York Times Magazine. In a letter to the New York Observer (and an expanded post on Google+), Susannah McCormick – daughter of renowned music historian Robert “Mack” McCormick – alleges that Sullivan and his research assistant “glibly” stole her father’s research in an act of “quasi theft.” In his response, Sullivan asserts that, “by hiding L. V. Thomas’s voice, by refusing for over half a century to credit or even so much as name the two singers who created those recordings while they or their contemporaries were alive, Mack McCormick committed a theft—through negligence or writer’s block or whatever reasons of his own—far graver than my citation of interviews L.V. granted him decades ago.”
Living with Books
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North Star
Where did George Orwell come around to socialism? Try the north of England. In a piece in Prospect Magazine, Stephen Ingle recounts the author’s journey through industrial Britain.
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A Definite Orange Theme, It Seems
The Twelve, Justin Cronin’s follow-up to The Passage, now has a cover and release date.
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What Would Jane Read?
Thanks to the Burney Centre at McGill University in Montreal, readers can now browse a virtual version of Jane Austen's library.
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