- The Independent
- @NYer Fiction

Jennifer Egan published her latest short story on Twitter

Last November police raided OWS’ camp at Zucotti Park, confiscating the contents of their ‘People’s Library’ in the process. Of the roughly 3,600 books swiped by the rozzers, only 1000 have been returned, 200 of them in ‘unusable’ condition.

Not the sort to take things lying down, the plucky OWS-ers filed a federal lawsuit against the City on Thursday.

- Reuters

yeahwriters:

Is half nine too early to write off the rest of the morning?

The Great Gatsby Game

The long-intended film version of a Confederacy of Dunces was recently revived with the promising news that Zach Galifianakis could now star, with Flight of the Conchords’ James Bobin directing. A script is currently being written by Phil Johnston who wrote the thoroughly passable Cedar Rapids and the upcoming Alexander Payne film Nebraska

The novel by John Kennedy Toole was published in 1980, 11 years after the author’s suicide. It won a Pulitzer in 1981.

- /Film

- Book Business

Celebrated publisher Nan A. Talese of Doubleday talks about her impressive career

The Hairpin have just published an interview with author-in-his-own-right Thom Steinback. Now 68, Steinbeck the younger talks about forgetting old loves, how his upbringing prepared him for the world, corresponding with his old man and why he became a writer, against poppa Steinbeck’s advice.

- The Hairpin

Sci-fi author Hugh Howey has bypassed most of that chart. His self-published series Wool was recently optioned by Ridley Scott and 20th Century Fox and now that’s out the way, Random House UK are going to give the books a full run. It’s safe to say he’s having a better week than you.

- Publisher’s Weekly
- Hugh Howey

Things our staggeringly unsackable education secretary does not want to do this week:

• provide special needs education when the parents of special needs sufferers could just be given some cash and told to figure it out for themselves
• apply the same nutritional standards that apply to state schools to free schools and academies

Things our staggeringly unsackable education secretary wants to do so much that he’ll find the money for it himself:

• Send a leather-bound copy of the King James Bible to every public school.

- The Guardian

Because books are shit and your childhood memories aren’t worth anything in these straitened times, Studiocanal has picked up producer David Heyman’s Paddington Bear project. The potentially reassuring news is that Paul King, perhaps best known for his work on The Mighty Boosh and Garth Merenghi’s Darkplace, will now write and direct the film. The predictable and not at all reassuring news is that it’s being pitched as a ‘modern take’ and that Paddington will be rendered by computers. Hooray for computers! We’ll take everything back and get right behind this film if they promise to use the same beautiful and weird stop-motion technique as the Ivor Wood TV series.

- Empire

Two previously lost pages of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s manuscript of Le Petit Prince have been found in France! One page contains a different wording of the part about gathering together all the earth’s inhabitants and the other page has a completely new passage. In it, the Prince encounters his first human being, an ‘ambassador of the human spirit’ with a thing for crosswords.

Le Petit Prince has sold over 140 million copies in ‘about 260 languages’. Saint-Exupery died shortly after the book’s first publication in 1944. It is absolutely gorgeous and it’s never too late to read it!

- Art Daily

Winterson, who has almost certainly written stuff other than Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, is to become a professor at the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing.  Until last year, the faculty boasted a very-expensive Martin Amis in the same role. From the beginning of the next academic year, Winterson will teach some undergrad and postgrad courses and is committed to four public lectures a year.

- The Guardian
- U of M Centre for New Writing

A thousand words.

- @john_self

When famous people die, the public outpouring of tributes, grief, inflatable alien dolls and so on can seem a little crass, bandwagony, disingenuous. Until yesterday the only celebrity I’d really mourned was John Peel. I listened to John Peel as a teenager and he opened me up to a lot of music. Music that maybe didn’t change my life, but certainly changed my outlook. The same can be said of Adam Yauch.

I can’t remember how old I was when I first saw the video to Fight For Your Right but I remember thinking that those three idiots busting through the dry wall were the coolest dudes I’d ever seen. Like Dennis The Menace but they rapped and kissed girls and spiked the punchbowl.

I was 13 or 14 when I began to actually listen to the Beastie Boys. Quickly getting over Licensed to Ill as a bit too juvenile, I skipped Paul’s Boutique and Check Your Head and went straight to Ill Communication, I was looking for Sabotage of course. The VHS of the Sabotage video, which included little featurettes about the imaginary cop show, I got one Christmas is almost unplayable now through overuse. Almost.

The Beasties quickly became one of my favourite bands and I didn’t talk to my mum for about a week the day she told me I couldn’t go and see them on the Hello Nasty tour. But I’m nearly fifteen, I remember saying. MCA was my favourite. He had that cool gravelly voice and always got to spit the most tuned-in lines. When Yauch raps ‘To all the mothers and the sisters and the wives and friends I want to offer my love and respect to the end’ on Sure Shot, he’s facing up to his childish past, growing up and preaching a message of solidarity and equality. When he takes a mallet to a gun in the Something’s Got To Give video, it was a statement that hit me hard. Maybe kind of trite but it mattered to stupid little teenage me. Gratitude is the first thing I learned to play on bass.

We got to see and hear Yauch grow up and for a lot of us he showed us a way forward. I’d be overegging this shit if I said that Yauch politicised me. My family were always pretty political and I developed an intuitive moral compass pretty well. But Yauch and a few other songwriters soon became its magnetic north. Yauch made me *listen* to music. When I found old interviews with him talking about Public Enemy and all that great unreservedly political hip-hop, he talked about the passion, the struggle, the meaning, the message. I bought Bad Brains’ self-titled album because it had a sticker on it with a quote from MCA, I’ve given myself a headache trying to remember what it said.

On one of my first ever grown-up pay days I splurged on the Anthology DVD and the Sounds of Science coffee table book. Yauch’s photos of Tibet and of the Buddhist temples he’d visited opened me up to religion. I’d been brought up strictly atheist and had sort of been conditioned to think religions were stupid, or at least kind of quirky. Buddhism, it turned out, wasn’t for me, however awesome some of its practitioners. Knowing that somebody I admired, somebody who’s picture I had on my wall, cared so much about this stuff made me look again with fresh, open eyes. He was a champion of love and of fairness and he wasn’t too cool to say so. Yauch used his celebrity to support the things he cared about. Not in the dodgy sense of running down to Haiti before the camera crews packed up, he was the real deal, or at least he seemed it to me.

The stuff he’s been doing most recently with Oscilloscope Labs was further proof of an interesting, dedicated guy maturing and taking on new interests and passions. The Oscope logo ahead of a film, and it’s going to sound corny but fuck you, gave me a feeling of oneness. A oneness between the pretentious liberal twentysomething getting ready for the hip indie films and the wide-eyed and stupid thirteen year old learning the lyrics inlay by rote.

My thoughts will be with Yauch and his loved ones for a while. And with his long-time collaborator, the elusive European filmmaker Nathaniel Hornblower.

Thank you MCA,

Ben Godfrey
The Night Light
Friday the 5th of May 2012

Kirby’s a stand-up chap and a pretty good writer. His last novel Bully is up for free on Amazon and is already topping their horror chart.

His latest novel Paint The Town Red is also available now. He tells us it’s been described as “a cross between Jurassic Park and Jaws” and we have no idea if he’s joking.

- Get Bully for free on Amazon
- Paint The Town Read