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The New York Public Library (NYPL) has acquired the archive of the New York Review of Books magazine. This publication garnered great fame for featuring pieces by several beloved writers such as W. H. Auden, Joan Didion, and Norman Mailer.

The NYPL team estimates that the materials will require about three years to fully process before it can be made available to researchers. Some of the notable items from the archive include letters, telegrams, emails, drafts, manuscripts, and galleys.

Here’s more from the press release: “The archive includes a wealth of correspondence between editors Silvers and Epstein and The Review’s wide range of authors over the magazine’s 50-year existence. This outstanding correspondence provides unique evidence of intellectual life in the United States in the second half of the 20th century. In addition, letters to The Review detail the lively literary disputes that have long given the magazine its character of intensity and passion for factual correctness. The archive shows the evolution of the magazine as it took a vocal role in opposition to both the Vietnam War and later wars in Iraq.”

When should writers work for free? It is one of the most difficult questions facing writers in the 21st Century as unpaid outlets multiply online.

In an interview at The Paris Review, we found a historic moment when famous authors wrote for free in a completely unknown publication. When the legendary editor Robert Silvers launched The New York Review of Books in 1962, he went straight to the most talented writers in the country and asked them to work for free.

Check it out:

Our thought was to think of the best writers in the world to review the books of the season—even people who hadn’t written book reviews for years or ever. Many of them we knew—Norman Mailer, [William] Styron, W. H. Auden, Edmund Wilson. We said, “Look, we have three weeks, we can’t pay a penny, will you do it?” And they all did.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

When should writers work for free? It is one of the most difficult questions facing writers in the 21st Century as unpaid outlets multiply online.

In an interview at The Paris Review, we found a historic moment when famous authors wrote for free in a completely unknown publication. When the legendary editor Robert Silvers launched The New York Review of Books in 1962, he went straight to the most talented writers in the country and asked them to work for free.

Check it out:

Our thought was to think of the best writers in the world to review the books of the season—even people who hadn’t written book reviews for years or ever. Many of them we knew—Norman Mailer, [William] Styron, W. H. Auden, Edmund Wilson. We said, “Look, we have three weeks, we can’t pay a penny, will you do it?” And they all did.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

In the 1980s, novelist Joan Didion collaborated with her late husband John Gregory Dunne on a script for Norman Mailer‘s novel, The Deer Park. The adaptation has collected dust ever since.

Now Mailer’s son, film producer Michael Mailer, wants to shoot the Didion-Dunne screenplay. According to The Daily, Mailer will collaborate with producers Cassian Elwes and Matt Palmieri on this project.

Here’s more from the article: “The Deer Park chronicles two romances during Hollywood’s Red Scare era. It was rejected as obscene by Mailer’s publisher in 1955.” Norman Mailer (pictured, via) adapted The Deer Park into a stage play. It opened off-broadway in 1967 and ran for 128 performances.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Author Norris Church Mailer passed away on Sunday. She was 61-years-old.

Mailer was born Barbara Jean Davis. She wrote a memoir called A Ticket to the Circus and two novels, Windchill Summer and Cheap Diamonds. She was married to the late author Norman Mailer for 27 years.

Random House offered this tribute to her literary life: “In 1975, she was living in Russellville, Arkansas where she was a painter and taught high-school art; she had also written about a hundred pages toward a novel (which she would later reshape into Windchill Summer and publish in 2000). She had read Norman Mailer’s biography of Marilyn Monroe, and in 1975 attended an Arkansas party for him. Subsequently, they dated, had one son whom they named John Buffalo in 1978, and were married in New York city in 1980. She took on her former married name as first name, ‘Norris,’ and took Mailer’s suggestion of ‘Church,’ evoking her intensive religious upbringing, as a surname.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

What if you promoted all day but never actually wrote anything?

Journalist Dennis Cass asks that question, and promotes his book at the same time in a bit of web video genius-ness. As I pointed out earlier today, more and more of the book promotion process is falling into the lap of the writer--so this sad-but-true-video is only going to get sadder and truer.

Over at the New York Observer, Choire Sicha got the literary blogosphere in a tizzy today by writing: "it’s not crazy at all to feel bad for the young male writers of our time, despite all they have done to us with their books. There are these legends that loom; all women, all terrifying. (Norman Mailer, sad to say, belongs to 1968, and that was so long ago already.)"

As a sort-of-young man writing in this young-men besotted world, I only have one piece of advice for anybody worried about that article. Read Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night. He had Vietnam and a divided Democratic Party; we have the Iraq War and another fractured political scene.

1968 wasn't so long ago. It's not about the quality of the men, it's about good writers meeting their historical moment. The next few troubled years will give all us literary men and women plenty to write about.

1) We give each other support.
2) We encourage each other.
3) We give each other honest feedback (without throwing tomatoes.)
4) We learn from each other.
5) We kick each other in the pants, when necessary.
6) We laugh, A LOT.

And, look! Here is an article about my very own group!

Is your spouse afraid to come near you because you’ll ask, “Which sounds better?” and then repeat three seemingly identical sentences with only the slightest changes of punctuation? Then join a writers’ group. Your family will love you for it!

(Tales From The Crypt illustration from http://myfonts.wordpress.com/2006/10/)

Paul Meisel, Nancy Tafuri, Leonard Everett Fisher and Jennifer Thermes will be signing books from 1 to 3 pm at The Cyrenius H. Booth Library.

The above illustration is by Paul Meisel from The Three Bears' Christmas by Kathy Duval