Lit Crit

The Huffington Post unveiled a new HuffPost Book Club today. Starting on January 3rd, the club will feature 10 books next year.

In addition to reading books, the online group will use Twitter, Facebook, Instagr.am, YouTube and Flickr to share reading experiences. It will also feature events at bookstores.

Here’s more from the release: “We begin with one of the most remarkable pieces of fiction in recent years: The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht … We’re telling you now, so you can add it to your Christmas list. We can’t wait to read it with you. The Book Club will officially begin on January 3rd. On February 7th, we will host an free event at St Mark’s Bookshop in New York City, featuring Téa Obreht. More on that soon.

The University of California, Davis English Department has posted a statement at the top of their webpage, calling for Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi to resign following a harsh police response to student activists last week.

The statement also urged the school disband the University of California Police Department. In the video embedded above, you can see a line of student protestors staring at Chancellor Katehi in a silent but powerful protest.

Here is the complete statement: “The faculty of the UC Davis English Department supports the Board of the Davis Faculty Association in calling for Chancellor Katehi’s immediate resignation and for ‘a policy that will end the practice of forcibly removing non-violent student, faculty, staff, and community protesters by police on the UC Davis campus.’ Further, given the demonstrable threat posed by the University of California Police Department and other law enforcement agencies to the safety of students, faculty, staff, and community members on our campus and others in the UC system, we propose that such a policy include the disbanding of the UCPD and the institution of an ordinance against the presence of police forces on the UC Davis campus, unless their presence is specifically requested by a member of the campus community. This will initiate a genuinely collective effort to determine how best to ensure the health and safety of the campus community at UC Davis.” (Via Maud Newton)

John Williams, the editor of The Second Pass book review site, has been hired as a web producer at The New York Times books section.

This morning, he tweeted the news: “couldn’t be more thrilled to be the new web producer for the books section of the New York Times.”

Here’s more about the new producer: “Williams, lives in Brooklyn, NY. From 2001-2007, he worked in the editorial department at HarperCollins. Before that, he spent time as a journalist in Texas and an editorial intern at Harper’s Magazine. His work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Slate, McSweeney’s, Stop Smiling, the Barnes & Noble Review, the Austin American-Statesman, the Dallas Morning News, and other publications.” (Via Sarah Weinman)

In a new Los Angeles Review of Books essay, Jonathan Lethem expressed his disappointment in a review by book critic James Wood.

Wood dissected The Fortress of Solitude in a 2003 New Republic review, prompting Lethem (pictured, via) to write him a private letter. He received a short note back, and eight years later, responded to the letter with a public essay about the review. What do you think?

Check it out: “Wood, in 4,200 painstaking words, couldn’t bring himself to mention that my characters found a magic ring that allowed them flight and invisibility. This, the sole distinguishing feature that put the book aside from those you’d otherwise compare it to (Henry Roth, say). The brute component of audacity, whether you felt it sank the book or exalted it or only made it odd. These fantastic events hinge the plot at several points, including the finale — you simply couldn’t not mention this and have read the book at all. Or rather, you couldn’t unless you were Wood.”

As Halloween nears, it’s time for our annual feature on literary costume ideas. The blogosphere was bursting with ideas last year, but we’d love to hear more suggestions–especially literary costumes for this GalleyCat editor’s one-year-old baby…

Share all your ideas at the #literarycostumes hastag created by Random House. 

Adventurous Writer pointed us toward a brilliant Curious George Man in the Yellow Hat costume (pictured, via).

The Book Bench set up a Flickr page collecting the best photos of literary Halloween costumes.

Read more

The Books They Gave Me is a new Tumblr blog collecting memories of books shared by lovers.

Here’s one story from the blog: “He, lovelorn literary loser, just like me—but better at even that than I was, for I was a mere apprentice—gave me a hardcover edition of the complete poems of William Blake. I’d brought him to the legendary Hyde Park, Chicago Powell’s, and the Blake edition was on my shopping list. I was back in school at 34, newly divorced, to finish the BA in English Literature I should have taken the first time around. Starry-eyed, in love with the man and the poems, I found the book, but sadly noted its $70 price tag…”

So we just had to ask: What’s the best book you ever received as a gift from your lover? If you want to share the story of that particular gift book, email the blog with your submission. The guidelines are simple: “submit a few paragraphs and a valid URL for a cover image of the exact edition you were given, if possible.”

The National Book Award finalists were unveiled yesterday and many readers instantly started drawing lists of influential authors who didn’t make the list. Over at Salon, Laura Miller took the most dramatic stance in her essay “How the National Book Awards made themselves irrelevant.”

She cited four popular novels that the judges passed over: The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach, The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides, State of Wonder by Ann Patchett and The Submission by Amy Waldman.

Here’s more from the essay: “the National Book Award in fiction, more than any other American literary prize, illustrates the ever-broadening cultural gap between the literary community and the reading public. The former believes that everyone reads as much as they do and that they still have the authority to shape readers’ tastes, while the latter increasingly suspects that it’s being served the literary equivalent of spinach. Like the Newbery Medal for children’s literature, awarded by librarians, the NBA has come to indicate a book that somebody else thinks you ought to read, whether you like it or not.”

Novelist Anton Strout recently started the Once and Future Podcast, a new interview series that aims to fill a genre gap in the podcasting world.

The fourth episode of the series is a pre-New York Comic Con special, including conversations with novelist Drew Magary and Book Country’s Colleen Lindsay. What other genres need a comprehensive podcast?

Here’s more about the podcast: “I wanted a place where I could talk about all things happening within my chosen genre, all the things I love in fantasy, science fiction, even some crossover into paranormal romance, including weekly segments focused on: breaking news, upcoming titles, interviews with guest authors from every point in their various careers, upcoming book tour info, convention news, and just overall general discussion of our genre. Parts of the podcast will be reader focused, but there will also be parts coming up for those who are writers, including interviews with professionals of all walks of life from within the world of publishing itself.”

Yesterday a pulp fiction loving hacker broke into the Trinity College Dublin website, adding a new professor to the school–Conan the Barbarian.

The post has since been removed, but the Guardian pointed us to a cached version of the page that will immortalize Conan’s brief tenure at Trinity College.

Here’s more from the fake entry: “He completed his PhD, entitled ‘To Hear The Lamentation of Their Women: Constructions of Masculinity in Contemporary Zamoran Literature’ at UCD and was appointed to the School of English in 2006, after successfully decapitating his predecessor during a bloody battle which will long be remembered in legend and song. In 2011/12, he will be teaching on the following courses: ‘The Relevance of Crom in the Modern World,’ ‘Theories of Literature,’ ‘Vengeance for Beginners,’ ‘Deciphering the Riddle of Steel’ and ‘D.H. Lawrence.’ He strongly objects to the terms of the Croke Park agreement and the current trend for remaking 1980s films that he believes were perfectly good enough in the first place.” (Image via, link via)

Television critic Nancy Franklin will no longer serve as the TV critic at The New Yorker.

She broke the story on Twitter: “Some news: I’m leaving my job as The New Yorker’s TV critic. Happy to have had, for 13 yrs, the best job ever, and happy to be giving it up.”

Franklin had worked at the magazine since 1978. She served as an editorial assistant and fact checker before becoming the nonfiction editor in 1985. She began writing for the magazine in 1995 with the feature, “How Did I Get Here?” (Via Motoko Rich)