lit feud
Page Six recaps the lit feud between Eggers and Co and the Underground Literary Alliance over an article that appears in the Eggers-funded The Believer (an article which Eggers didn’t want to publish but he was overruled.)
Page Six recaps the lit feud between Eggers and Co and the Underground Literary Alliance over an article that appears in the Eggers-funded The Believer (an article which Eggers didn’t want to publish but he was overruled.)
La Zadie showed up on time, looked bashfully down while Benjamin Weissman delivered a glowing introduction, and then walked up to the rostrum and began reading. Her voice was huskier than I expected and she oozed confidence. She read three passages from The Autograph Man. The audience swooned at her fantastic delivery and humor. But when she finished reading she announced that she was told not to take questions. Oh, what a disappointment it was. Apparently, the folks at the Armand Hammer were hosting a Seabiscuit party and wanted to get the common folk out of the way before the beautiful people started showing up.
Lit star Zadie Smith will be reading at the Armand Hammer museum tonight.
Alex went to Comic Con last weekend. I wasn’t able to join him, but he brought me back some goodies: The third volume of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (the French edition–it’s not out yet in English.) This one talks about her four years in Vienna in the 1980s, after her parents sent her off to live with a friend to attend high school there, in the aftermath of the 1979 revolution. Her sharp observations about what it’s like to be a foreigner (a Middle-Eastern woman to boot) in Kurt Waldheim’s Austria is laced with her trademark humor. I’m looking forward to the next book, which talks about her return to Iran as a young woman. Alex also got me Broderies, a humorous little book about the women in her family. It’s so delectable that I’m rationing myself to ten pages a day.
Update: Why didn’t I hear about this before? Grant Morrison (of X-Men fame) is writing an “Islamic sci-fi love story” for DC comics, titled Vimanarama and due out in the Spring. Link via Bookslut.
to Harper’s magazine. The August issue, for example, has an excellent article by Wil Hylton on the spread of Hepatitis in U.S. prisons and what correctional HMOs are (not) doing about it; a very funny article on the Vidocq Society, named after the 18th century French criminal/detective/writer (one of my dad’s favorite crime writers–he named our German Shepherd after him); and a sobering article on the nature of dissidence by Edward Hoagland. Oh, and it also has excerpts from rent-a-negro.com.
The poet Reetika Vazirani (and wife of Pulitzer prize winner Yusef Komunyakaa) killed her son and then committed suicide. Details are scant. Link via Moby.