“It was astonishing. Utterly astonishing. Everyone of them seemed . . . entranced by him.” Sometimes older books get a second life given contemporary contexts; such is the case with Sinclair Lewis‘s 1935 It Can’t Happen Here, reports Time. The book, which was written as Hitler came to power, has sold out online. See also this New Yorker piece about a recent stage adaptation of Lewis’s semi-satirical novel.
It Can Happen Here
The Island of Last Chances
Have you ever had a script rejected? Did you reassure yourself it had to do with just about anything other than the quality of your writing? Well now’s the chance to put your money where your mouth is – a new Hollywood startup called Adaptive Studios is “rummaging through the trash” and breathing new life into dead movie scripts.
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Passé Profanity
“Certain words have gone from being shocking to being neutered,” says Glamour editor in chief Cindi Leive, who has embraced the printing of “vulgar words” on her magazine’s cover since November of 2011. Ms. Leive is one of several women’s magazine editors who believe “magazines are catching up with other media, where women have been using explicit language for years.”
‘Best American’ on the Cheap
Pretty good deal on Amazon today: All the e-book versions of the “Best American” books are $1.99.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Wallace, O’Rourke, Levy
It seems almost silly to mention it since the book’s been on shelves and discussed in the book pages for a couple of weeks now, but the “official” release date of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King is this Friday. (Our review was published today.) Meghan O’Rourke’s grief memoir The Long Goodbye is out this week. And another look at our culture through the lens of our technology is now out, Steven Levy’s In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives.
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Hatchet Man
“Book reviews are another matter, because a bad review has the potential to be far more adversarial: one writer spending years on a book, one reviewer spending days reading it, and a lasting relationship being created between the two in print. Or, perhaps, a history between the two that lends the review a particular piquancy.” An exegesis of the good bad review.
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