3:AM Magazine

Launched by Viola Fort and Katie McCalmont (”two twenty-seven year olds who got bored of boring jobs and hearing about rubbish books”), Untitled Books is both a new type of online bookshop (”Books are arranged in themes such as Desire, Intoxication, Great Adventures and Violence”) and a monthly literary webzine which they describe as “a cross between a British McSweeney’s, a young Paris Review and a New Yorker for the iPod generation”.

BoingBoing TV meet More Information Than You Require author John Hodgman:

The latest stage of Bill Drummond’s mission The 17 is rolling out nationwide.

More in The Guardian.

David Foster Wallace committed suicide on 12th September 2008 at the age of 46. His works includes the novels The Broom of the System (1987) and Infinite Jest (1996); the short story collections Girl with Curious Hair (1989) Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999), and Oblivion: Stories (2004); and non-fiction works Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race In the Urban Present (1990), co-authored with Mark Costello, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997), Up, Simba! (2000), Everything and More (2003) and Consider the Lobster (2005).

David Foster Wallace’s work has been likened to that of Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and DFW’s contemporaries William T. Vollmann and Richard Powers. A staggeringly intelligent and gifted author, his “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage” is a classic study of grammar and an object lesson in how to write an essay; likewise “E Unibus Pluram” – an invigorating analysis of television’s influence on contemporary literature.

The DFW website The Howling Fantods has more news and links to obituaries from around the world. Condolences to all concerned.

The curse of writer’s block. * Sam Jordison in the Independent ponders his own mortality and gets his kit off: “There I was, the breeze gently playing around my buttocks, with absolutely nothing between myself and the Isle of Man in the hazy distance”. * The new Frédéric Beigbeder is upon us. * Jay McInerney on Sarah Palin. * The latest issue of Triple Canopy is devoted to New Orleans. * Nick Kent advertises new French clothes chain. * It took 3 weeks to write but 30 years to film: On the Road coming to a cinema near you. * Iain Sinclair on the mysterious Roland Camberton. * Twittering Mad Men. * It’s Little House on the Bowery Day over at Dennis Cooper’s (read our two interviews with him here and there). * Michael Bracewell meets Brett Anderson: “Of course, people don’t want their rock stars to be clean-cut and happy; they want them to be unhinged, decadent and desperate. But I believe there is another side of life — a positive side — that I can write about with just as much passion and intensity”. * Heidi James in Beat the Dust (also Dan Fante). * Our good friend Vim Cortez has a new website. * Michel Houellebecq abandons his opposition to free market economics and talks about Carla Bruni’s adaptation of one of his poems. * Tim Parks on Gregory Bateson.

Last week, Canongate Books published a new edition of David Simon’s Homicide: A Year On the Killing Streets. Originally published by Houghton Mifflin back in 1991, this edition of the true-crime masterpiece is decked out in urban silver and black, not unlike the new version of Richard Price’s Clockers.

The re-issue of Homicide is a smart move by Canongate, following on Simon’s success with The Wire. The streets of Baltimore provide the backdrop, and the cops, politicians, drug pushers, and gangs are the players. A gritty poetic investigation into the day-to-day lives of inner-city homicide detectives.

The Wire is one of the best examples of television art and craft, not really surprising when writers such as David Simon, George Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane, and Richard Price have worked on the show. Like its televisual successor, Homicide is relentless in its research, brutal in its realism, and written in a prose that scorches like the burning wheels of a getaway car.

“The horrors of the 20th century echo through Bacon’s sparse interiors. A man swerves in his chair. There is death or a lover at the door. There, I’m at it now. Next I’ll be going on about Bacon’s Grand Guignol dramas, the encroaching blackness and intimations of mortality, the horror that lurks beneath the skin. Everyone else does. The catalogue to this retrospective has a screaming pope on the cover, unless it’s a pope at the dentist or a yawning pope, with Bacon’s name picked out in gold.”

Adrian Searle waxes lyrical (and voices some doubts) on Francis Bacon’s major retrospective at Tate Britain.

Further: Independent review / Times retrospective / New York Review profile / Peter Bradshaw on an encounter with the artist / Bacon and women / the closure of the infamous Colony Room / Bacon’s contemporaries pay tribute / “A mind on fire” / “Box of tricks” / “The beast within” / South Bank Show special, (II), (III), (IV), (V), (VI) / Touching the void.