Earlier, we reported on a disturbing trend in which New Yorker writers take their (usually quite interesting) article and streeeeetch it like pizza dough to become book-length so that they (and an agent and publisher) can make more money off it.
Apparently, New Yorker Editor David Remnick is sensitive to the accusation, but not so sensitive that it’ll stop him from doing the same thing.
Yesterday’s New York Times books section has a teeny piece by Dave Itzkoff revealing:
Mr. Remnick said that the biography, “The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama,” would not be simply a “pumped up” version of a 12,000-word article about the Obama campaign that he wrote for the November 2008 issue of The New Yorker. Mr. Remnick, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his book “Lenin’s Tomb,” said the biography would include considerable material about the president that was not in the article,
Why wasn’t it in there? Because it was unnecessary?!
We hope the book will stay just as short as Dave Itzkoff’s writeup. (By the way, where is Itzkoff’s own book-length version of his New York Mag memoir? That might actually be worth reading.)
Tags: Barack Obama, Dave Itzkoff, David Remnick, New Yorker, The Life and Rise of Barack Obama
February 28, 2010 at 10:10 pm |
But! But! You missed the best part! Look at the correction appended: http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/22/obama-biography-is-coming-from-new-yorker-editor/
April 21, 2010 at 12:54 pm |
My better half and I attended a Q&A in promotion of the book this past Monday in Seattle. My boyfriend noticed in his reading of The Bridge that much of the content is pumped up with long passages quoted directly from Obama’s own books.
April 27, 2010 at 10:45 am |
Oy vey. Sadly, we are proven right again. love that cupcake photo!