Suzanne E. Guiod has been appointed to be the first editor in chief at Syracuse University Press, effective June 16. She is currently editorial director at the University of Rochester Press, where she’s been since 2004.

Patrick White was cranky enough while alive, so will he be grumbling in his grave about what a Sydney academic and colleagues have gone and done?

Last week, they published, with Knopf Australia, The Hanging Garden, a novel fragment that the 1973 Nobel Laureate in literature told his literary executor to burn.

White has joined an impressive group of writers countermanded in that way by their heirs and representatives, among them Jane Austen, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Franz Kafka, Vladimir Nabokov, Roberto Bolaño, and David Foster Wallace.

Patrick White is Australia’s only Nobelist in literature (save for 2003 laureate J.M. Coetzee, a South African naturalized as Australian in 2006). He lived from 1912 to 1990, and before he died, he gave his executor, Barbara Mobbs, instructions to destroy anything he left behind. He had, however, earlier assured archivists at the…

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David Yaffe and Ruth Franklin are co-winners of an award dedicated to the “support and encouragement of emerging critics” and established in honor of the critic and academic Roger Shattuck (1923-2005), a leading scholar of Proust.

Yaffe is a professor of English at Syracuse University, a music critic for The Nation, and a contributor to The Chronicle Review, among other publications. His most recent book is Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown (Yale University Press), and he is at work on Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Ruth Franklin is a literary critic and senior editor at The New Republic and has written for many other publications. She is author of A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction (Oxford University Press, 2010) and is currently at work on a biography of the American writer Shirley Jackson.

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Several academics were among the winners of Pulitzer Prizes in Letters, Drama, and Music announced today.

In History, the late Manning Marable was lauded for his Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (Viking). The author was a professor of African-American studies, history, and public affairs at Columbia University. The book, moved from the category of Biography by the Pulitzer board, was cited as “an exploration of the legendary life and provocative views of one of the most significant African-Americans in U.S. history, a work that separates fact from fiction and blends the heroic and tragic.”

In Biography, John Lewis Gaddis, a professor of history at Yale University, won for George F. Kennan: An American Life (Penguin), an “engaging portrait of a globetrotting diplomat whose complicated life was interwoven with the Cold War and America’s emergence as the world’s dominant power.”
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George Dyson is a historian of science and technology. His new book, Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe, was just published by Pantheon.

Q: What’s the first thing you read in the morning?

A: The first thing I usually read is the index to the inbox on my e-mail account. If there’s something important, I may open the message(s) immediately, otherwise they wait until I have gone running, made coffee, or both.

Q: What newspapers and magazines do you subscribe to or read regularly? What do you read in print versus online versus mobile?

A: I subscribe (in print) to Science, Nature, and The New Yorker, and read them regularly. I read The New York Times in print when I can get it, and I read The Bellingham Herald, the Guardian, The Seattle Times, and The New York Times (as a digital subscriber) online. I do not read any periodicals on my mobile device (a…

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Jeff Sharlet (1942-69)

The Iowa Review, based at the University of Iowa, will be host to a new writing contest, the Jeff Sharlet Memorial Award for Veterans. The contest, with a prize of $1,000 and promise of publication in the review, is for writing in any genre on any subject by U.S. military veterans and active-duty personnel. The entries will be judged by the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Robert Olen Butler, who is a professor of English at Florida State University.

The prize was made possible by a gift from the family of Jeff Sharlet (1942-69), a Vietnam veteran, and antiwar writer and activist.

Sharlet was founder of Vietnam GI, “the first anti-war paper by and for enlisted men and women” says his nephew and namesake in an e-mail circulated about the award. The nephew, who is himself a writer as well as an a…

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Stanford University reports that Alan Harvey will become director of Stanford University Press as of July 1. Harvey, now deputy director and editor-in-chief, joined the press in 2002. As director he will succeed Geoffrey Burn, who has led SUP since 2000. As part of the transition, Burn will serve as deputy director for 12 months. Burn will also continue as the acquisitions editor for the Stanford Security Studies series, which he founded.

Reached at Stanford, Harvey comments: “It seems as if everyone wants to know what I am going to change and/or do differently. But that ignores the fact that Geoffrey Burn and I have been working alongside each other for the past 10 years to reconstruct the Press.” He says that the strategic plan he and Burn created is ongoing and “still relevant” and there are few wholesale changes he has planned.

The publishing phenomenon that is Willis Barnstone is too busy to pause just because another of his books is fresh off the presses.

As his The Poems of Jesus Christ, from Norton, makes its way to readers, he is finishing up another book for publication this summer, from Black Widow Press, The ABC of Translation. It will encapsule his more than 60 years of thinking about the art.

Also near completion is Ways of Ecstasy, his study of the writing process as one of standing outside oneself—the meaning of “ecstasy”—whether in passion, dreaming, mysticism, oblivion, or even hatred. A major expansion of his 1983 book, Poetics of Ecstasy, it has new chapters on the likes of Rainer Maria Rilke, Charles Baudelaire, Jack Kerouac, and Dante from whom Kerouac, “on the road,” drew so much.

Ways runs to 600 pages. Volume has never been a problem for Barnstone. Apparently, less and…

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Michael Walzer is a professor emeritus of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, N.J., and a longtime editor of Dissent. His new book, In God’s Shadow: Politics in the Hebrew Bible, will be published by Yale University Press in June.

Q. What’s the first thing you read in the morning?

A. I read The New York Times, paper edition, with my first cup of coffee: “the morning prayer of modern man.”  When I get to my computer, I read Haaretz online.

Q. What newspapers and magazines do you subscribe to or read regularly? What do you read in print versus online versus mobile?

A. The Times, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, the Jewish Review of Books, and, of course, Dissent, all come to the house; we subscribe, off and on, to The New Yorker. I read all these in print.

Q. What is the best article you’ve read recently?

A. Joanne…

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Some three months after announcing new hires and other changes at Virginia Quarterly Review following controversy at the journal, its editor, Ted Genoways, is stepping down. Read The Chronicle’s Robin Wilson on Genoways’s future plans.