Gary Shteyngart, who recently thrilled his Twitter followers (including our very own Martha Gill) by live tweeting Middlemarch, has announced that he is writing a memoir: Little Failure. The Russian-American author of Absurdistan (2006) and Super Sad True Love Story (2011) had this to say: “I’ve finally written a book that isn’t a ribald satire and because it’s actually based on my life, contains almost no sex whatsoever. I’ve lived this troubled life so others don’t have to. Learn from my failure, please.”
@shteyngart I CAN HAS LADISLAW
— Martha Gill (@Martha_Gill) April 11, 2013
Julian Barnes, Hilary Mantel, Howard Jacobson and Margaret Atwood are among a number of authors who have annotated first editions of their best-known works, to be auctioned at Sotheby’s in aid of English PEN. Writing in the margin of Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding wrote: “Am I supposed to be criticising the book saying how much better I’d so it now? Trouble is, I think I peaked.”
F Scott Fitzgerald was paid $2,000 for The Great Gatsby upon initial publication in 1925. He later made $16,666 in film rights. A ledger in which Fitzgerald recorded his publications, income and diary notes has been put online by the University of South Carolina. Elizabeth Sudduth, director of the Ernest F Hollings Library said: “We know he didn’t spell very well,” adding, “his arithmetic wasn’t much better.”
The non-fiction publisher Notting Hill Editions have announced a new £20,000 essay prize. The inaugural William Hazlitt Essay Prize winner will be announced on 26 September this year. Essays will be judged “on the originality of the idea, the quality of the prose and the ability to communicate to a wide audience” and will be judged by Harry Mount, Gaby Wood, Adam Mars-Jones, Lady Antonia Fraser and David Shields.
The Paris Review has moved to a new set of offices in New York’s art district. Editor Lorin Stein told the New York Observer: “ ‘We entertain a lot,’ … referring to the journal’s famous office parties for writers and the writerly adjacent. The office needs to be part reading room, for the interns going through the slush pile, and part salon for the editors working late into the evening.” Salon indeed.
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