LINKS

From the piece "Composition for Robert Walser," published at Words Without Borders

News

* Cody’s Books is now really, truly, and, one must accept, irrevocably, dead

* A new documentary exploring the life and death of Cody’s Books and Kepler’s bookstore will air on PBS in November

* Marcelo reports on Bolano’s literary executor, who possibly lost his job for writing a negative review. Marcelo also reproduces this quote from him, with which I need not state my agreement:

The way things are … the critic tends to act exactly like a disc
jockey. The DJ’s success, just like the new critics’, depends on his
capacity for tuning in to the dance floor’s occupants, whose appetites,
tastes, and level of excitement or euphoria he must divine, stimulate
and encourage.

* Encounter Books decides to forego the honor of sending its books to the NYTBR for review

* There’s no link to a story online anywhere, so I reprint this news blurb in toto from Publisher’s Lunch. Sounds interesting:

Joint Venture to
Provide Online Slices of Academic Books
The University of Chicago Press’s Chicago Distribution Center has
signed with  technology provider Tizra to allow distributed
publishers to sell subscriptions to online books. The joint venture
will begin this summer in a pilot program with the University of
Chicago Press itself and others, and will use the services of their
Bibliovault digital repository.

* This story prompts the question, Was not having your newspaper edited in India really what was holding it back? I, for one, look forward to the day when U.S. book reviews are written solely by Indians.

* Americans must go teach the Chinese to speak English like we do, or else we’ll end up speaking it like they do

* The Guardian on Dave Eggers’s oral history project

Reviews

* The Complete Review reviews a book written by the mayor of Rome and translated by the man who wrote Godel, Escher, Bach

* Richard Eder on the last of Camus’s notebooks

* Hitchens on Rushdie
 

Audio

* The science of itching, as discussed by the author of a new book on the subject

Video

* From the website Camouflage Lenses, a poem put to film:

The Rest

* Levi Stahl of the University of Chicago press has been doing some mean Savage Detectives blogging of late

* Coetzee’s relationship with his censors wasn’t quite what you’d expect:

The reality of the author’s run-ins with the censors belies the popular
image. Not only were the censors complimentary of the books – for
example, one censor called In the Heart of the Country
‘outstandingly well-written’ – but they were themselves sophisticated
readers known to Coetzee. Among them was H. van der Merwe Scholz, a
professor at the University of Cape Town, where Coetzee also taught.
Another was Anna M. Louw, herself a novelist based in the city. These
censors were part of Coetzee’s intellectual and social world, drawn
from the small South African intelligentsia who, Coetzee suggested,
considered themselves to be ‘guardians of the Republic of Letters… book
reviewers to the power of n’ protecting a space for literature from a
philistine state.

* The great New York novel?

* Classic? Not quite.