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Don DeLillo has signed a deal with the Simon & Schuster imprint, Scribner. He has written a new novel entitled Zero K.

Here’s more from the press release: “Zero K follows billionaire Ross Lockhart whose younger wife Artis Martineau has a terminal illness. Ross is a significant investor in a secretive, remote compound where death is controlled and bodies are preserved until medical advances can restore individuals to improved lives. Lockhart hopes Artis can benefit from this pioneering science.”

The publication date for this book has been scheduled for May 03, 2016. DeLillo was recently named the winner of the 2015 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters by the National Book Foundation. In the past, he has been honored with the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

61 authors and 14 artists have made annotations to some of their most beloved works for the First Editions/Second Thoughts (FEST) auction. The funds from this venture will benefit the PEN American Center.

The writers added in features to first edition copies of their books such as notes, essays, sketches, photos, and letters to the reader. The artists had a choice of re-making either a monograph or an important art piece.

All of the artwork and annotated books will be put on public display at Christie’s New York starting November 17th. The auction itself will take place on December 2nd.

The New York Times has an exclucisve video starring Robert A. Caro, Paul Auster, and Jane Smiley who talk about the experience of re-reading their own books (embedded above). Click here to watch another video for more details about the auction event.

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Harper’s Magazine has revised its Folio section, printing the first chapter novelist John le Carré‘s A Delicate Truth. The magazine also published Afterword by the great spy novelist.

The series began in 1992 with “Pafko at the Wall” by Don DeLillo. In a publisher’s note, John R. MacArthur shared a bit of history about the Folio section, adding some editorial history about fears for long form writing in magazines. Check it out:

Like many things in the history of Harper’s, Folio was conjured from a mix of editorial vision and practical necessity. When Tina Brown was appointed editor of The New Yorker in June 1992, I assumed she would begin running much shorter pieces. Harper’s response, I told Lewis Lapham, Michael Pollan, and Gerry Marzorati at a hastily organized lunch, should be from time to time to run much longer pieces that might not only satisfy the cravings of frustrated New Yorker readers but also accommodate Harper’s contributors who simply needed more space to say what they wanted to say … We’re still committed to concision, of course, but in this age of web-driven snippets, we believe there’s all the more need for writers to be able to think in depth and at sufficient length to tell complex stories.

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By Elijah Siegler

Last night at the Oscars, the Academy awarded a golden statuette to a film about a flawed hero who we the audience empathize with, who departs their normal life, enters a strange world, but returns triumphantly. Did I just describe Best Picture Winner Argo?

Yes, but also best animated short winner, Paperman, best animated feature winner, Brave, and best live action short winner, Curfew.

So whether the hero is a CIA operative, an besotted office worker, an Scottish princess or a suicidal man, and whether the journey is to revolutionary Iran, to a world of sentient paper airplanes, to a dark forest, or to a magical bowling alley, these films, and it’s safe to say, most of their fellow nominees, have spiritually uplifting themes, and generally follow a pattern of a mythic journey to redemption. (Indeed as my colleague’s S. Brent Plate pointed out, religion permeates all nine best picture nominees and the ceremonies themselves.)

Academy members, and audiences in general, like and expect movies to be heroic journeys of redemption. One 2012 film, Cosmopolis, is about a journey that’s anything but heroic and redemptive. Indeed, the film, based on a short novel by Don DeLillo, charts a billionaire’s limo ride across Manhattan to get a haircut as ironic, pointless and even destructive. Unsurprisingly, Cosmopolis received precisely zero Oscar nominations. Now, I’m not here to argue that this film was better than any of the nine nominated films.

One reason that the film’s director and screenwriter, David Cronenberg, despite being widely regarded as one of the world’s best living filmmakers, has never been nominated for, let alone won, an Academy Award, is because all his films explicitly reject themes of “redemption” and “spiritual uplift.”

Cronenberg is known not only an originator of the body horror subgenre (Shivers, Rabid, The Brood), and for adapting difficult works of literature (Naked Lunch, Crash, Cosmopolis), but for being one of the few filmmakers who explicitly identifies as atheist, and whose work ignores all religious themes. Cronenberg’s public atheism is all the more notable considering his association with horror, a genre often analyzed as fundamentally religious. Think about all the horror films that include one of more of the following: the dead displaced, satanic cults, covens, possession, exorcism, ghosts, and curses. Or think how often religious symbols a church or a crucifix, become sites of terror. So it is significant that none of Cronenberg’s films have any religious or supernatural elements. And this is not coincidence, but his conscious choice. More succinctly, he told me when I interviewed him at his home in Toronto, he does not “want to promote supernatural thinking.”

More significantly, both his earlier horror films and his later more literary films eschew the thematic underpinning virtually every Hollywood film ever: the battle between good and evil. Cronenberg’s films do not provide the visual and aural clues that conventional Hollywood cinema uses to denote good and evil. His heroes are not particularly altruistic or, indeed, heroic. The protagonists of several of his films [SPOILER ALERT], including Videodrome, The Fly and Dead Ringers die—but their deaths are neither redemptive nor sacrificial, nor do they result in any kind of triumphant return, symbolic or otherwise.

Many of his films do not have traditional villains. Even his seemingly conventional antagonists, from the sex parasites in Shivers to the multinational corporation Spectacular Optical in Videodrome to Naked Lunch’s Dr. Benway, are sinister and scary, but function as necessary agents of change.

When Cronenberg does use religious imagery to suggest evil, it is neither supernatural nor transcendent. Rather, his religious imagery evokes authoritarian institutions. Dead Ringers, based on a true story of twin gynecologists’ descent into madness and addiction, includes examination scenes set in the Mantle Clinic, their medical practice. The clinic functions as a kind of quasi-religious institution and the scenes are terrifying (even though this is not at all a traditional horror film), inasmuch as they show the power that doctors have over patients, and that men have over women (see Image).

In both his personal philosophy and his films, David Cronenberg sees no need for transcendence, or for the fulfillment of the hero’s quest, or for cosmic reward and punishment. And yet his films wrestle with the same questions of meaning that our favorite “religious” films do (questions of sex and death, power and desire, family and society, identity and transformation) but that do so in a uniquely nonreligious way. The Oscars may never give Cronenberg his due, but anyone interested in religion, film and their relationship, needs to.

Elijah Siegler is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the College of Charleston. His article “David Cronenberg: The secular auteur as critic of religion” was recently published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion.

The Journal of the American Academy of Religion is generally considered to be the top academic journal in the field of religious studies. This international quarterly journal publishes top scholarly articles that cover the full range of world religious traditions together with provocative studies of the methodologies by which these traditions are explored.

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The post Do the Oscars snub films without redemptive messages? appeared first on OUPblog.

I admit it: I have trouble retaining the details of books. Most texts eventually get relegated to a dark corner of my mind, slowly accumulating dust until they're barely visible at all. The only thing I can remember about DeLillo's White Noise is that the narrator's wife is named Babette, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen [...]

Stephen King’s longtime editor Nan Graham has been promoted to publisher and senior VP of Simon & Schuster’s Scribner imprint.

Graham has spent 18 years at the imprint, working with authors that included Don DeLillo, Miranda July, Frank McCourt, Annie Proulx, and Colm Toibin. Scribner Publishing Group president Susan Moldow had this statement in the release:

“As if Nan hadn’t amply proven how deserved this promotion is by her firm hand in shaping the list and staff and insuring the growth of the Scribner imprint over the last eighteen years, her performance of late surely demonstrates that she continues to exercise her singular editorial instincts, abilities, and leadership qualities at the highest levels.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Staffers at The Times recommend their favorite baseball books.

Staffers at The Times recommend their favorite baseball books.

Author Steven Millhauser has won the $20,000 Story Prize for his short story collection, We Others. The two runners-up, Don DeLillo and Edith Pearlman, were given $5,000 apiece.

Story Prize director Larry Dark had a conversation with the three finalists at the ceremony last night. Dark and Story Prize founder Julie Lindsey chose the finalists, drawing from a pool of among 92 books from 60 different publishers and imprints.

Here’s more from the release: “Millhauser is renowned for both his short stories and novels. He is the author of four previous story collections and seven novels, including Edwin Mullhouse and Martin Dressler: The Life and Times of an American Dreamer, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997. His work has been translated into fifteen languages, and his story “Eisenheim the Illusionist” was the basis of the 2006 film The Illusionist.” (Photo via Michael Lionstar)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Author Steven Millhauser has won the $20,000 Story Prize for his short story collection, We Others. The two runners-up, Don DeLillo and Edith Pearlman, were given $5,000 apiece.

Story Prize director Larry Dark had a conversation with the three finalists at the ceremony last night. Dark and Story Prize founder Julie Lindsey chose the finalists, drawing from a pool of among 92 books from 60 different publishers and imprints.

Here’s more from the release: “Millhauser is renowned for both his short stories and novels. He is the author of four previous story collections and seven novels, including Edwin Mullhouse and Martin Dressler: The Life and Times of an American Dreamer, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997. His work has been translated into fifteen languages, and his story “Eisenheim the Illusionist” was the basis of the 2006 film The Illusionist.” (Photo via Michael Lionstar)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Over at MTV News, sixteen upcoming movies were pitted against one another to determine the winner of the “MTV Movie Brawl 2012.” In the final round, almost four million votes were cast and Cosmopolis (a Don DeLillo adaptation starring Twilight actor Robert Pattinson) emerged victorious over The Hunger Games (starring Oscar-nominated actress Jennifer Lawrence).

In an interview with MTV, director David Cronenberg explained how he first learned about the brawl: “Cosmopolis, while I think in terms of what it is as cinema is pretty hefty, but in terms of budget and promotion, it’s an underdog compared to something like the Dark Knight franchise. I really didn’t think we would have much of a chance. That really got my attention.”

In the video embedded above, MTV caught up with Cosmopolis actor Paul Giamatti to get his reaction on the movie’s win. Several of the Movie Brawl film are literary adaptations including John Carter, The Avengers, Snow White & the Huntsman, The Hobbitand The Dark Knight Rises.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

These words appear toward the end of Charles McGrath's recent NYT profile of Don DeLillo:

Mr. DeLillo is 73 now and considers himself a late bloomer. He didn’t publish his first novel until he was 35, after quitting a job in advertising and after what he calls “a golden age of reading,” in which he would “consume fiction as if it were breakfast cereal.”

Asked why his first book took him so long, he answered: “I don’t have any explanation for that. All I know is that one day I said to myself, ‘I think I’m a writer.’ I started making sentences I didn’t know I was capable of.”

I think I'm a writer.....

I am reminded of a certain correspondence that sprung from a certain 1996 Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, to which I'd gone at the invitation of Jayne Anne Phillips, whom I'd come to know the year before in Prague. I met Brooks Hansen, the extraordinarily imaginative, genre-hopping author of such books as The Brotherhood of Joseph, The Chess Garden, The Monsters of St. Helena, John the Baptizer, and Caesar's Antlers, at Bread Loaf. We exchanged a few notes afterward, and in one, Brooks—perhaps inadvertently—shifted the way I thought of myself, insisting that it wasn't what one had published that rendered one a writer. It was what one could do with words.

Not a writer yet, is what I had thought of myself up until then, for I only had short story and essay publication to my name, no book. Becoming a writer, is what I began to understand—a category that I continue to slot myself into today: still becoming.

For how boring it would be, how anti-climactic, to have already arrived.