Last night I went to the launch party for the second issue of 400 Words, and I’d like to recommend that you all go check the zine out. It’s compulsively entertaining.
The letter Carroll penned to his friend Winifred MacDonald from his summer house on the coast of England surfaced on eBay earlier this year. “Hand written and beautifully signed,” the vendor enthused. “Guaranteed authentic.” The letter was genuine, all right, as the collector who bought it came to discover. Trouble was, someone else owned it: Yale University. (via fade theory)
Philip Roth, prolific in his old age.
“Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, Against the Day, reads like the sort of imitation of a Thomas Pynchon novel that a dogged but ungainly fan of this author’s might have written on quaaludes.” Is it just me, or should it be Quaaludes?
Courtesy of OJ’s confession being pulled, HarperCollins has nearly half a million books to destroy. If the books weigh about a pound each, that comes out to 200 tons of paper. I have one word for the publisher: compost.
The whole purpose of MNW is to publish first novels, in any genre, and to do so as economically as possible. Theoretically, at least, this should, in the long run, benefit all interested parties: publisher, writer, and reader.
I don’t think the novel is dead. I think the readers are dead.