Page-Turner - On books and the writing life.

February 11, 2009

In the News: Pushkin’s Blood, Hot Bachelors

At the Monday unveiling of the Kindle 2, in New York City, Jeff Bezos used the e-reader’s internal dictionary to look up the word “chary” in Cormac McCarthy’s novel “The Road.”

The Alexander Pushkin Apartment Museum, in St. Petersburg, is conducting tests on its leather sofa to determine if it’s the one on which Pushkin bled to death.

Along with downsizing its workforce, HarperCollins has announced that its Collins division will be closing.

The former girlfriend of the Finnish Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen must pay a fine for causing Vanhanen distress with her tell-all memoir, “The Prime Minister’s Bride.”

“Baboon Metaphysics,” “All Dogs Have ADHD,” and “The Industrial Vagina” are among eighteen selections in the running for The Bookseller’s Diagram Prize, which recognizes outlandish book titles.

The writer Zakaria Tamer, who is renowned in the Arab world for his children’s books, satirical newspaper columns, and very short stories, has won the Al Amajidi Ibn Dhaher Blue Metropolis Arab Literary Prize.

Keith Gessen and Salman Rushdie are among New York City’s “50 Hottest Bachelors,” according to Page Six Magazine.

Two Ukrainian schoolchildren who tried to read Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin” in Russian for their school’s poetry recitation contest were disqualified for reciting in “the wrong language.”

Leslie McGrath, whose poem “Butter Taps” will appear on two million one-pound packages of Cabot Creamery butter, says of the work, “I will freely admit that it basically sounds like the butter version of ‘Goodnight Moon.’”

Cuba’s eighteenth International Book Fair begins tomorrow, in Havana.

The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood has condemned the sale of toys and trinkets in Scholastic’s book-club fliers for children.

Raymond Scott, a book dealer accused of stealing a Shakespeare First Folio worth three million pounds, says, “Like Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, I have had to suffer not only the whips and scorns of time but also the law’s delay.”

The playwright Robert Anderson, the author of “Tea and Sympathy,” has died, at the age of ninety-one.

You might like Most shared
   
To get more of The New Yorker's signature mix of politics, culture and the arts: Subscribe Now
 
Subscribe to The New Yorker
GET THE BEST OF THE NEW YORKER IN YOUR INBOX
  • This Week: Links to articles and Web-only features in your inbox every Monday.
  • Cartoons: A weekly note from the New Yorker's cartoon editor.
  • Daily: What's new today on newyorker.com.
  • Receive all the latest fake news from The Borowitz Report.
I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its User Agreement, and Privacy Policy.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2009/02/in-the-news-fil.html
www.newyorker.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-15
117554
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:KANKJTDWJJDZUY2LWX6PWQGJFFJQ5JUI
<urn:uuid:ce8708cf-a37c-4dd7-8c96-43065499c97c>
2014-04-24T09:02:47Z
23.0.160.81
sha1:RZP36UBSI7FFI6BKOBRQHAWA3EWKOLCP
<urn:uuid:9d502078-7a42-4662-813d-fe01b3376c99>
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2009/02/in-the-news-fil.html
response
<urn:uuid:55f5b55f-611b-4f2f-a1b8-2917cc4495cc>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-147-4-33.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-15
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for April 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf