Artist Cindy Kane apparently has an easy time making friends with her writer friends in Martha’s Vineyard: For the past few years she’s been working on a series called “Mapping Writers”, for which Ward Just, Tony Horwitz, Geraldine Brooks, Jules Feiffer, and others contributed pages from their notebooks. (If you happen to be in the Boston area, the Art Complex Museum in Duxbury, Mass., is showing work from the series through May 17.)
The organizers of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada’s most prestigious literary award have broken with tradition and put a couple of non-Canadians on the judging panel, including Russell Banks. Not everybody is pleased.
New Hampshire author Emily Winslow‘s debut novel, The Whole World, doesn’t come out until next year, but you can moon over her sweet pad in Cambridge, England, in the meantime.
The next issue of PEN America looks great. Included is an excerpt from Colum McCann‘s forthcoming novel, Let the Great World Spin. I very much enjoyed his 2007 novel, Zoli, so I’m looking forward to this one.
Also looking good: The new issue of Stop Smiling, which is thick with interviews with writers, including Paul Auster, Jonathan Lethem, and Junot Diaz. The entire Diaz interview is available free online.
Not available free online but worth chasing down is a piece in the April Harper’s about New York whorehouses by author (and alleged inhuman turd) Nelson Algren. The piece, written in 1979 and included in the forthcoming Algren collection Entrapment and Other Writings, is an almost tender defense of johns, written in the wake of a crackdown on Manhattan brothels:
[The mayor] assumes that the average fellow, in search of sex, wears shades and a false beard and lurks in the shadows near the whorehouse door. When he sees there is no cop in sight, he makes a run for the door, disguises his voice to the girl at the desk, and keeps his coat collar turned up while waiting.
That isn’t how it is. The man walks up to the window in the same way he would walk to the mutuel window at the racetrack, gets his ticket, and hopes for a winner. The mayor makes a false presumption of guilt that causes not only whores to suffer but johns as well. Because it forces both to employ extraordinary means to have an act that is good only when it is kept simple.
markathitakis.com 