This Is Your Best Shot to Finish a Pynchon Novel

Biography, story collection provide 'necessary corrective'

(NEWSER) - Two new books on Raymond Carver—a biography and a collection of stories—bring a "welcome and necessary corrective" to what we know of the short story master, writes Stephen King. Carol Sklenicka's A Writer's Life cuts Carver too much slack for his personal life—he was a "sometimes dangerous" drunk who treated his first wife shabbily, after all—but it's "invaluable" as "a chronicle of Carver’s growth as a writer," King writes in the New York Times Book Review . More»

(NEWSER) - David Foster Wallace declared war on depression and addiction in writing his last, unfinished novel, D. T. Max writes in the New Yorker. The writer's suicide by hanging last year was the culmination of a struggle to live normally, to achieve what he called “adult sanity," without antidepressants or the labyrinthine writing style he had developed in Infinite Jest. His last testament to that struggle, The Pale King, will be published next year. More»

Edgar Sawtelle is Hamlet -inspired 'bolt from the blue'

(NEWSER) - The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, the debut novel from former software developer David Wroblewski, is “a great, big, mesmerizing read, audaciously envisioned as classic Americana," Janet Maslin raves in the New York Times. "Pick up this book and expect to feel very, very reluctant to put it down," she says of a coming-of-age story involving a deaf boy and the dogs his family breeds. More»

Author of Love and Consequences fesses up to fabricating

(NEWSER) - Margaret Jones' acclaimed memoir of a half-Native American girl growing up in a foster home in South Central LA and running with gangs, Love and Consequences, turns out to be fiction, the New York Times reports. Jones, whose real name is Seltzer, grew up with her birth parents in an affluent LA neighborhood; she was busted when her sister spotted her photo in a Times feature about the book and called her publisher. More»

Son's imagined convo with dead dad might've saved final manuscript

(NEWSER) - Dmitri Nabokov's decision not to destroy his famed father's unfinished manuscript followed an imagined conversation with Vladimir's ghost, writes Ron Rosenbaum for Slate. Rosenbaum, who sleuthed his way through the "to burn or not to burn" debate, was previously told by Dmitri—who hinted at the book's genius before announcing his intent to destroy it—that he would keep his decision secret. More»