In this intricately woven short story collection, The Greatest Show, Michael Downs tells the sad long story of crumbling American cities through the lens of a tragic circus fire of 1944. …more

In English for the first time, Nescio’s Amsterdam Stories retrace timeless youthful abandon with mature yet doleful emotional detachment. …more

“P.S. Reading is a commitment. You’ve got to disengage and pay attention. But when done right, you enter a whole ’nother world. Kind of like a great record, at least those of yore which were not background but doors to an alternative universe. You can bat people over the head or you can entice them with quality and word of mouth. That’s how Wild made it, the buzz is deafening. Assuming you’re paying attention. Don’t let it turn you off. The great thing about this book is it’s personal. And personal, when done right, is universal.”

This postscript is from a Lefsetz Letter. …more

“My poems were an essence of images. They had the cinema inside them before I started working for it.”

A quote from Tonino Guerra, in a New York Times obituary about an extraordinary life. Guerra, the prolific screenwriter, poet, novelist and artist, died on Wednesday in northern Italy, at age 92.

Among others, he collaborated with Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Theo Angelopoulos, and wrote Antonioni’s famous trilogy L’Avventura, La Notte, and L’Eclisse as well as Fellini’s 1973 classic Amarcord.

Son of a fishmonger father and an illiterate mother (whom Guerra himself taught to read and write), he was a poet initially and received his first film credit at age 36, and he continued to work into his eighties. “I believe I have given a little bit of poetry to all the directors I worked with,” he’d said.

It is mildly surprising that the New York Times didn’t see John Jeremiah Sullivan’s essay “My Debt to Ireland” as fit to print in its Sunday magazine on a date closer to March 17, and, actually, it’s sort of a shame, because Sullivan’s piece undercuts a certain mythology many Irish-Americans keep about Ireland the country and Ireland the nation.

Sullivan’s essay hurtles across Ireland’s rich literary, political, economic, and religious histories, and he intertwines this with a candid personal one: a boy whose near-blind father read Joyce to him in a basement in Indiana, a poor student living in Cork city in the early 1990s, a man in his late thirties touring a place formerly known as the Celtic Tiger, a mature writer trying to discern what almost every reader also is: what’s ahead? …more

“There was something of a religious about John Leonard, however much of a principled skeptic he may have been. With his pale complexion, his round eyeglasses, there was a translucence to him such as is given to the spiritually employed. It was as if he had been assigned, somewhere off the earth, to take note of writers and to testify to their value, and was, willy-nilly, a patron saint of the writing trade, of the story-makers, of the grub street international bunch of us.”

—E.L. Doctorow, in an essay adapted from his introduction to Reading for My Life: Writings, 1958–2008, by John Leonard (edited by Sue Leonard), to be published in March by Viking Penguin.

The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 2, 1941–1956 was published recently by Cambridge University Press, and on its blog the publisher has compiled a list of books Beckett read during those years, culled from his letters, with commentary from the Irishman.

Here are a few of his judgments: …more

Lori Baker’s new short story collection, Crash and Tell, is led by a cast of women whose rich creative minds derail their own lives. …more

Memory is a protean thing.

There is an eerie room of memories at the current exhibit at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Walk into it and all the signposts of a collective nostalgia are there but the room is more than the recognizable objects therein. And this might be what memory is: fleeting, inexplicable, overpowering, capricious, unreliable, and also concrete. And sometimes memory is all these paradoxes (and more) at the same time. …more

“I have all the habits of someone who lived [in New York City] in the ’70s,” Fran Lebowitz tells City Room. “Which is that, if I have a pencil, I have a death grip on it. I see the people on the subway, they take their Blackberry out, I think really? If that got stolen, I wouldn’t even feel sorry for you.”

Lebowitz (or simply, Fran) was rediscovered, it seems, by the Newspaper of Record (and others) after Public Speaking, Martin Scorcese’s HBO documentary about her was released late last year, and it’s no wonder. Fran’s a bullhorn. She speaks freely about what New York has devolved into these last decades, and she’ll say what a lot of residents want to say about their own city but, oddly, very often won’t.

Some examples: …more

Bill Cunningham, longtime fashion photographer at The New York Times, is the subject of a new documentary, Bill Cunningham New York, and what an enchanting film it is. …more

A week ago the labor writer and activist Jonathan Tasini filed a $105-million lawsuit in United States District Court, in New York’s Southern District, against HuffPost’s new owner AOL Inc., and HuffPost co-founders Arianna Huffington and Kenneth Lerer, seeking to “vindicate the fundamental principle that creators of value deserve to be compensated.” …more

Baseball’s spring training—really winter training—seems pretty superfluous these days. Most players employ personal training staffs, stay in top shape year-round, and hone their skills relentlessly with the aid of the most advanced technologies available.

Yet still they arrive at camp for a month and a half of training and exhibition games each February, all of which could likely be cut down to a couple of weeks at most, with a review of fundamentals and the necessary player cuts and reassignments.

Of course baseball writers follow teams to Florida and Arizona. From there they issue dispatches in voices that grow increasingly desperate for content. This made worse by the fact that, in addition to articles, they are required to write blog posts, make social-media updates, provide video and photographic evidence et cetera—and they must submit almost hourly. …more

In Win Riley’s fine Walker Percy: A Documentary Film, Walker Percy’s friends, family, and biographers discuss the life, work, and philosophy of the author of The Moviegoer, Love in the Ruins, and The Thanatos Syndrome. Most notable in the film is the trenchant commentary and criticism of Jay Tolson and Paul Elie.

Narrated in part by Riley and Richard Ford, the short documentary recounts major facts familiar to those who know Percy’s life story: …more

“I first met Adam Purple in 1978, when journalist Norman Green and I did a story about him for New York Magazine,” says photographer Harvey Wang, in an interview with Vanishing New York. “I found [Adam] to be one of the most intelligent and interesting people I had ever met, and though I didn’t understand half the things he was talking about, I continued to visit him over the years.”

For more than a decade of his life, Adam Purple built and maintained The Garden of Eden, an Earthworks installation that existed on Eldridge Street from 1975 until 1986, when it was destroyed by New York City to make way for a housing project. …more

Fourth Avenue in Manhattan deserves an epitaph, bookseller Walter Goldwater told The New York Times in 1981, for a story about the neighborhood that was then still known as Book Row.

“As a book center, the street is gone,” he was quoted as saying. “Somebody dies, somebody becomes moribund, somebody moves to Florida. Most of us never made a substantial living anyway.”

At the end of the article, using that inverted-pyramid journalistic form, the Times also quotes Jack Biblo of Biblo and Tannen’s bookstore, formerly at 63 Fourth Avenue (now home to The Shevchenko Scientific Society), and Biblo repeats Goldwater’s opening sentiment.

“I never intended to give up bookselling on Fourth Avenue, but you also had to work 16 hours a day, and sometimes you didn’t make a dollar.” He concluded, “It was a joy, but I’d hate to see it come back.” …more

At the end of a CNBC post about how U.S. home values have fallen 26% since the 2006 peak, surpassing the drop experienced from 1928 through 1933, there is a link to the Zillow page for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, in Washington D.C.

The White House is not for sale (not literally, anyway), but here are the details, in case a sign does go up on the front lawn: …more

Martin Scorcese’s HBO documentary Public Speaking is about the writer Fran Lebowitz and, judging by the trailer and reviews, it consists mostly of Scorcese filming Lebowitz while she talks, which might be her true métier. If you’ve seen Lebowitz interviewed, it’s no wonder Scorcese chose to make his movie this way.

For those who don’t subscribe to HBO, there is an alternative way to see Lebowitz in full interview mode, over the years, documentary-style and collocated: …more

For more than two years now the Orwell Prize has been blogging George Orwell’s diaries, in real time, seventy years to the day that each entry was originally penned. They are now halfway through their project.

The posts begin in 1938, when Orwell traveled to Morocco in order to recuperate from illness, and the online publication will end in 2012—or 1942, as it were, in the midst of chaos, the world still at war.

As 2010 comes to a close, so does George Orwell’s 1940. …more

“There is great promise in the digital future for libraries,” says John Palfrey, Henry N. Ess III Professor of Law and Vice Dean of Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School, “but we need to work in coordinated fashion across many institutions to shape it in a way that is in the public interest. We are excited about creating a big tent in which many leaders can work together to create the design for a Digital Public Library of America.”

With funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society announced it “will convene a large and diverse group of stakeholders in a planning program to define the scope, architecture, costs and administration” for such a library.

A “novel without words” captures the turmoil of the working class: public housing, alcoholism, youth violence, adult bitterness, boredom, crime, and drugs. …more

“In a recent New York Magazine article about Frey’s new fiction factory, Frey is quoted saying that documentary is ‘a thesis on truth that hasn’t been proven yet’ and that he ‘should have never fucking apologized’ to Oprah. Many would agree with him. What’s to apologize for? In the age of Google, YouTube, BitTorrent, etc., a growing majority believes they own everything and should apologize for nothing. Perhaps this is the true cultural shift. While art has always been a product of influence, the ‘anxiety of influence’ no longer exists. Why should we cite our sources? Why should we write our paper? What do we have to apologize for? From this frame of reference, the hyperlink is as valuable as the thought.”

Nathan Ihara on literary theft at MobyLives.

It has been eleven years since The Magnetic Fields released the three-album set 69 Love Songs—with its funny-sad, sarcastic, satirical songs about, well, love songs. …more

Robert Darnton, historian and the director of the Harvard University Library, has been writing recently about digitized books.

Last December, for instance, he suggested the creation of a national digital library as a way to solve the Google Books lawsuit (settlement still pending; judge Denny Chin yet to issue a ruling). Darnton returned to this idea in a recent blog post as well as in a speech he gave during a workshop in Cambridge last month, the text of which also appeared in the pages of the New York Review of Books.

His idea has an idealistic Founding-Fathers/New-Deal ring to it, but can it happen? …more

Joshua Mohr’s second novel returns to the seedy side of San Francisco, where the addicted and the lost search for redemption. …more

A crime novel set in a fictional Mexican city delves into the unsolved murders of two decades. …more

Poet, artist, and punk-rock legend Patti Smith sat down last week with journalist Amy Goodman to discuss, among other things, Smith’s memoir Just Kids—reviewed by us in February—about her life and friendship with the late artist Robert Mapplethorpe.

Smith was interviewed before a live audience and parts aired on Goodman’s Democracy Now! program. It is a funny, serious, and very entertaining interview. …more

Austrian writer Peter Handke begins his 1972 novel Short Letter, Long Farewell with the following:

“Jefferson Street is a quiet thoroughfare in Providence. It circles around the business section, changes its name to Norwich Street in the South End, and leads into the old Boston Post Road. Here and there Jefferson Street widens into small squares bordered by beech and maple trees. …more

“The most ambitious solution would transform Google’s digital database into a truly public library.”

“That, of course, would require an act of Congress, one that would make a decisive break with the American habit of determining public issues by private lawsuit. The legislation would have to settle ancillary problems—how to adjust copyright, deal with orphan books, and compensate Google for its investment in digitizing—but it would have the advantage of clearing up a messy legal landscape and of giving the American people what they deserve: a national digital library equal to the needs of the twenty-first century. […] We are agreed that something must be done to improve the nation’s health. Why not do something to enrich its culture?”

-Robert Darnton from Harvard University has a good summary of the Google Book Search situation and some interesting ideas on how to settle it in “Google and the New Digital Future.”

If you won’t read a newspaper on a New York City subway, where will you read it? As zeitgeist, as canary in the mine, the habits of New York subway riders signal the end of print newspapers. …more