Culture

There's No Poker in the First 19 Pages of Colson Whitehead's New Novel

Plus: Amazon Publishing lands its first big author,

By Ray Gustini
Saved Stories
This article is from the archive of our partner .

Today in the book world: you can read 19 pages of the upcoming Colson Whitehead novel, Gordon Lish gets the n+1 treatment and a big legal win for The Help author Katherine Stockett.

  • "The first section"--about 19 pages worth--of Colson Whitehead's upcoming novel Zero One is available to read using Scribd. The full book comes out in October. It's not about Whitehead's experiences at this year's World Series of Poker, but still looks pretty good.  [The Millions]
  • In the new n+1 magazine, Carla Blumenkrantz offers either a defense or another takedown of legendary Alfred A. Knopf editor Gordon Lish, whose drastic cuts to Raymond Carver's short stories have prompted Carver's widow Tess Gallagher to threaten to republish Carver's stories so people could read the "true, original" version without Lish's edits, she told The New Yorker in 2007. The full piece isn't online, and we can't tell from the description of Blumenkrantz's piece which way it will go:

Lish drove into San Francisco on the rolling coastal highways, saw the Bay open up before him just as Kerouac described it, and entered the city, its “long bleak streets with trolley wires all shrouded in fog whiteness.” It was 1959, and he was 26 years old, a grown man compared to his young hero Moriarty, and past the supposed age of adventure; his wife and young daughter were traveling with him. He was late to the party, too: Kerouac had moved to Orlando and the Beat scene was dissipating.

Are we the only ones flashing back--not unpleasantly--to the opening scene from Zodiac? [n+1]

  • A Mississippi judge has dismissed a claim brought by Abline Cooper, a maid in Jackson, Miss., that The Help author Katherine Stockett based the character of Aibileen on Cooper. According to The Hollywood Reporter, after the case was dismissed, Cooper "wiped away tears and screamed at reporters," telling Fox News, "She's a liar! She knows she did it!." [The Hollywood Reporter and Fox News] 
  • Timothy Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Body, has signed with Amazon Publishing, in what GalleyCat's calling "the first big deal for the new Amazon imprint led by former agent Larry Kirshbaum," who was only hired back in May. Ferriss' first book for the imprint, The 4-Hour Chef, is due to arrive April 2012. [GalleyCat]
This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.