New York Times Book Review
Pure Imagination
The New York Times ran an incendiary letter over the weekend, written by a 17-year-old from Birmingham, Ala., named Alec Niedenthal, who wanted to tell the editors of the Sunday Book Review that the future of literature belongs to him. Mr. Niedenthal, who graduated from high school last week and is preparing to attend the New College of Florida, used dramatic language to express this idea. This made him sound like a passionate, big-brained visionary.
"You've heard it straight from the tropical mouth of a teenager who is entirely conscientious of the metamorphoses in ideas, principles (or lack thereof) and influences being undergone right under your collective noses," Mr. Niedenthal wrote in his letter. "The next Great American Novel will come not from Pynchon, Wallace, DeLillo (he’s already had his turn anyway) or any other of your literary heroes."
He went on: "It will spring from the iMac-fettered keyboards of the young, challenging, Facebook-and-MySpace-addled minds that you have so hastily jettisoned as literary jetsam, from those who see and comprehend, still to the delirious ignorance of the villainous Powers That Be, incalculable brands of grade-A terror being perpetrated unabashedly both by those whom we trust and those whom we loathe."
Mr. Niedenthal's rhetoric has not gone unnoticed: In the days since his letter appeared, he has received e-mails from editors at Grove/Atlantic and HarperCollins interested in seeing his work. (His father has also expressed his interest.)
Media Mob thought we should get familiar now, before he gets any more famous. Below, excerpts from our Q&A with the sad young literary man.
Barry Gewen, Editor at New York Times Book Review, Throws a Rock at Leon Wieseltier
Barry Gewen, one of the editors on the staff of The New York Times Book Review, has written a fierce little post on the NYTBR's Paper Cuts blog, in which he calls out the famously severe New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier for calling Malcolm Gladwell an "idiot" in a recent column.
"Wieseltier has always enjoyed a good literary brawl, most famously perhaps, with his long takedown years ago of the work and career of Cornel West," Mr. Gewen writes. "Wieseltier knows how to spew vitriol, and the smoke that rises from the page can be fun for readers to inhale... But in a column Wieseltier did for the March 12 issue of The New Republic, I think he stepped over the line. " read more »
