Famous Literary Spats

From the good people at Flavorwire:

In 2002, Whitehead gave us a hilarious and scathing review of A Multitude of Sins in The New York Times. He writes, “The characters’ sense of befuddlement comes to infect, but never to enlighten, the reader.” He later notes, “At the top of the story, the protagonist offers an Awkward Pang of Simmering Dissatisfaction, which sounds suspiciously like the A.P.S.D. offered by the character in the previous story.” For this, Richard Ford spit on him at a Poets & Writers party. Afterward, Whitehead said, “This wasn’t the first time some old coot had drooled on me, and it probably won’t be the last. But I would like to warn the many other people who panned the book that they might want to get a rain poncho, in case of inclement Ford.”


Famous Literary Spats

The End of The Big Box Book Store

Remember 10 years ago and everyone was fretting about the death of the independent book store because the large book retailers were gobbling up space? But also remember that if you actually cared about books, you always liked shopping at the independent book store as opposed to the large retailer? Turns out you were right.

From Salon: How Borders Lost Its Soul

"About 10 years ago, Borders opened a store in Hyde Park, less than a mile from 57th Street Books. It's on this week's extinction list. So it turns out that after all the Op-Ed fretting about neighborhoods being swallowed by commercial behemoths, there are neighborhoods where an independent bookstore served the local market better than Borders."


Read more at Salon

Modern Novels - Too Long?

Interesting post on the length of modern novels, and whether they should be that long or not.

"Literary novels appear to have universalised their length to at least 300 pages. It is a rare publishing event when a respected author produces something dinkier. Ian McEwan did it in 2007 with On Chesil Beach, his story of a disastrous wedding night; in 2010 Bret Easton Ellis gave us Imperial Bedrooms, his first novel in five years, which concluded in 250 pages and was all the more arresting for it."

It all depends on the work. I did think that Freedom was too long, but I wanted more about the son and his wife with the half-formed personality.  Imperial Bedrooms was more of a novella than a full novel, but I didn't want to continue any longer than it did.

The Independent