On Monday Farrar, Straus and Giroux acquired a biography of Blanche Knopf—the wife of Alfred A. Knopf, founder and namesake of Random House’s rival literary imprint—by Laura Claridge.
“What’s fascinating about it is this writer has access to a tremendous cache of papers,” FSG executive editor Ileene Smith told The Observer yesterday.
Although she was Read More
Today The New York Times has a story about Professor Irwin Corey, the 97-year-old stand-up comedian who has spent the past 17 years begging on the street on behalf of his favorite charity, which donates medical supplies to children in Cuba. The article neglects to mention our favorite Mr. Corey stunt, when he accepted Thomas Pynchon’s National Book Award for Gravity’s Rainbow in 1973. Read More
Reading the memo from Markus Dohle last Wednesday morning about the reorganization of Random House was an exercise in restraint. The temptation to skip ahead—to bypass the note’s soft top and find out as quickly as possible the part that unveiled, finally, after six silent months, how Random House Inc. would change under Mr. Dohle’s Read More
The Return of History and the End of Dreams By Robert Kagan Alfred A. Knopf, 115 pages, $19.95
Consider the natural history of the Detroit muscle car: The Mustang began life in 1963 as a stripped-down roadster in the European tradition. As the culture and market matured, Ford responded each year with ad hoc Read More
