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Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
Meryl Streep to Star in Series Adaptation of ‘The Corrections’ From Jonathan Franzen, CBS Studios
I had to check the calendar when I saw this news over the weekend. And no it was not April 1st, so this is legit. Meryl Streep is “attached” to star in a series adaptation of Jonathan Franzen’s 2001 novel, The Corrections. For those of you who don’t know, there are several pieces of this that are surprising. First of all, Franzen’s star has faded in the intervening years since Time did this. Second, there was already an attempt a decade ago to adapt the book as a series that even saw a pilot shot, which starred a truly wild cast (Chris Cooper, Dianne Wiest, Ewan McGregor, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Rhys Ifans and Greta Gerwig!). Third, big budget adaptations have been on the wane, and The Corrections doesn’t have a murder/mystery plot that maps neatly onto some of the more popular mid-budget literary adaptations we have seen do well, somehow all starring Nicole Kidman. I could not be more interested in how this is going to go. Still, I give it less than a 50/50 shot of becoming a thing, but with Streep willing to do it, some producer somewhere is going to kick the tires.
The Internet Archive’s Fight to Save Itself
Terrific piece at Wired by Kate Knibbs on The Internet Archive, which is fighting for its legal life at the moment. I found myself most drawn to the group’s founder, Brewster Kahle, and his zeal for making the world’s information more accessible. I am not a legal expert by any stretch, but I certainly hope The IA is not destroyed by the fines it could face following the recent loss of an appeal in a significant case brought against it by Hachette. I can see how scanning copyrighted print books and loaning them out digitally isn’t strictly legal. But there is so much the organization does to make the world richer and more reachable that I hope it survives, even if this piece of its archive has to be shuttered to do so. How can you not, after reading something like this?:“The story of Brewster Kahle is that of a guy who wins the lottery,” says longtime archivist Jason Scott. “And he and his wife, Mary, turned around and said, awesome, we get to be librarians now.”
Who Pays for the Arts?
The money, for art as for anything, has to come from somewhere. This piece in Esquire looks at a recent decline in private giving for arts organizations and how they are trying to figure out what’s next. Iceland is held up as a model in governmental support (one of the more striking facts in the world of books and reading that I have ever read crops up again here: 1 in 10 Icelanders will publish a book in their lifetime), but like private giving, government support is subject to changes of heart, fashion, or politics. Could crowd-funding and subscriptions offer a way forward? These are essentially recurring micro-philanthropy payments, which diversifies the risk of a big donor walking away. For profit companies, including this one, have already seen the ballast that direct cash from audiences can provide. The question becomes will your listeners or readers or attendees sign up to support you, outside of buying the books themselves as they come out, forever?