By Kat Stoeffel 3/22/12 1:47pm

Publishing

hungrygirl

$70,000 Worth of Marijuana Shipped to Nonexistent St. Martin’s Press Employee

Federal agents intercepted eleven pounds of marijuana bound for St. Martins Press’s Flatiron headquarters earlier this month, reports The Smoking Gun. The two parcels, addressed to a fictitious St. Martins employee named Karen Wright, were seized at a post office in California after they were sniffed out by a drug detection dog.

A company operator told The Smoking Gun no one by that name works at the company.

Because the Feds did not attempt to smoke out “Karen Wright” with a controlled delivery, the excitement is pretty much over for the moment, except on Twitter, where someone with the handle @KarenWright_SMP has been asking if anyone has seen the day’s mail and soliciting tips for coming up with $70,000 fast. Hypothetically speaking. Read More

By Rosanna Boscawen 8/17/11 5:40pm

Reading

Hughes. Courtesy Amy Wilton.

Literary Brooklyn’s Self-Reflective Gathering

­­Home to Walt Whitman, the father of American poetry, Brooklyn has raised Henry Miller and inspired Hart Crane and Truman Capote, among many others. And in today’s Brooklyn, of course, the literati teem through the streets – it’s difficult to buy a coffee these days without tripping over Jonathan Safran Foer or Jhumpa Lahiri en Read More

By Staff 11/07/06 11:41pm

The Finale: Spitzer’s Speech

Eliot Spitzer was the last to speak here tonight, and it was his speech that made the greatest reach towards grandeur.

“Today was not a victory of one candidate or one Party but of all those irrepressible optimists who have dreamed of a resurgent New York,” said Spitzer, who vowed to work to make Read More

By David Thomson 5/30/05 12:00am

Three Thrilling Tales, One Gorgeous Arc

Specimen Days, by Michael Cunningham. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pages, $25.

Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days is an extraordinary book, as ambitious as it is generous; and the depth of its kindness, or grace, is to convey that it is we ourselves, the multitude, who are extraordinary, or might be. If that sounds Read More

By NYO Staff 12:00am

Mauro of Manhattan

“Are you Italian?”

“Yes. How do you know?”

“I don’t mean to be flirting with you, but you really look Italian.”

I smiled: “And …. How Italians are supposed to look like?”

She smiled: “I don’t know. Elegant, I guess. Mamma mia!”

The lady was very beautiful. I had noticed her as Read More

By Blake Bailey 5/10/04 12:00am

Friendly, Spreading Influence: Sweet Links in a Lonely Life

A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, 1854-1967 , by Rachel Cohen. Random House, 363 pages, $25.95.

Borrowing a phrase from Twain, Rachel Cohen describes her splendid new book as a “private history”-but there are some nice public moments as well. Would you believe that a poet once threw out the Read More

By Adam Kirsch 8/12/02 12:00am

Randy Poets Glorify Gotham, They Sing of Urban Liberation

Poems of New York , edited by Elizabeth Schmidt. Everyman’s Library/Alfred A. Knopf, 256 pages, $12.50.

Globalization, we often hear, is making every place identical, Jakarta just another version of Toronto. But in poetry, at least, cities are guaranteed their own distinctive lives. Literature preserves them at the moment not necessarily of their greatest Read More