Thanks to all my Book Expo video viewers — it was fun to do, and I am currently planning how I want it to develop. I haven’t written up half of the stuff I was planning on, but I think I’ll let my contribution to BEA remain in video form. My one last piece is a long interview with Jeanne Leiby, former editor of the Florida Review and currently editor of the Southern Review, and that will be edited by this weekend.
Read the Creatures issue of Boldtype, if you haven’t already. I reviewed the sheep-detective novel “Three Bags Full” by Leonie Swann, and there’s also a review of Jorges Luis Borges’ “Imaginary Beings,” a book that you don’t find that often in English but is well worth the search.
Don’t miss the Summer edition of The Quarterly Conversation. Speaking of Borges, check out “The Man Who Invented Borges.” Also, “Why I Joined the POD People,” which starts off “I’ve never really cared all that much for books.”
Is 2666 is the “Big Book” of Book Expo?
So the seventeen-year-old kid who wrote a letter to the New York Times about making way for the new generation of authors, whom he described as “the young, challenging, Facebook-and-MySpace-addled minds that you have so hastily jettisoned as literary jetsam,” has not only been interviewed by The New York Observer but contacted by Grove/Atlantic and HarperCollins requesting manuscripts. If only it was that easy for the rest of us to avoid the slush pile. Then again, I’m not a wunderkid who had read William Vollmann, William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Scott Snyder, Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon, and David Foster Wallace before graduating high school. (via The Elegant Variation)
One thought on “2008 Round Up”
If you were more conscientious of the metamorphoses in ideas, etc., maybe you could avoid the slush pile, too.