Critical Linking: February 15, 2012
“I haven’t read a novel in years.”
Philip Roth said something similar a few months ago. Cormac McCarthy says it and….nothing.
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“Gosh I wish I could do it all over.”
The now-infamous plagiarist Q.R. Markham. An enthralling story.
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“…for almost every two books borrowed, a library patron bought one book.”
With brick-and-mortar stores disappearing, libraries are having their moment in the book industry spotlight.
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“Chabon has spoken frequently and bitterly about his vexed relationship with Hollywood. The list of unfilmed, abandoned, or otherwise bungled projects is long: a romantic comedy about old Jews on a cruise, sold to Hollywood’s resident littérateur, producer Scott Rudin, but never filmed; rejected story ideas for X-Men and Fantastic Four; the unproduced Kavalier and Clay adaptation, which Chabon spent more than a year writing; a draft screenplay of Spiderman 2, only part of which was used for the eventual film; and a live-action version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which Disney hired Chabon to write, in 2004, before they replaced him. In 2008, the Coen brothers announced they were adapting The Yiddish Policemen’s Union on the heels of A Serious Man; that, too, has landed in development purgatory, never to be heard about since.”
Goddammit. Think of all the Chabon prose we’ve lost in the meantime.
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“As fewer readers and book buyers are cultivated by thoughtful booksellers, fewer book-lovers are able to turn into bookstore clerks, and fewer sales outlets exist for the many quality presses that don’t have big budgets.”
I love independent bookstores, but they can’t take credit for the existence of readers.
