Famous Authors on Famous People
Atlas Books and HarperCollins Publishers are in talks to revive a series of minibiographies that married famous authors with famous subjects -- like Mary Gordon with Joan of Arc or Garry Wills with St. Augustine.
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So Mr. Atlas and Jesse Cohen, the other top editor at Atlas Books, signed up the novelist David Foster Wallace to do a biography of a Georg Cantor, a 19th-century German mathematician. As Mr. Cohen explained, "He's the one who discovered that there are different levels of infinity, and some are bigger than others."
I imagine the challenge will be to limit DFW to 200 pages. Maybe if they tell him to write a long essay instead of a short book.
Currently listening to: haujobb - Perfect Average.
Posted by Bill Stilwell at October 19, 2002 11:54 AM