one day a pretty web site

The Believer joins the ranks of those with beautiful sites, and also promises to put up content from the first two years in archives and make some full articles from current issues available online soon.

The Rake notes this too and mentions the Jonathan Lethem/Paul Auster conversation in this month's issue, which I haven't got around to reading yet. I will say that I wondered if the Believer has dropped its convention of tagging the "interviewer" or the person not the focus of the interview as BLVR throughout the interview rather than using their name or if they just dropped it for Lethem. This has held for all the interviews I've read, regardless of the prominence of the interviewer. (I do read it as Paul Auster being the focal point and it not being about both of them.) An idle thought.

You might also be interested in Laurie Muchnick's latest Newsday column, about various things and including this paragraph:

What's wrong with this, you might ask? Publishing has always been more of an art than a science, and you never really know when an author is going to break out of the pack. Who would have predicted that Ann Patchett's "Bel Canto" would become a bestseller after she had published three novels to good reviews but no great sales? You probably never heard of Karen Joy Fowler until she wrote "The Jane Austen Book Club," but she's the author of four earlier books. And Lipsyte himself has gotten so much publicity that his book is selling much better than expected.

But you and I knew who KJF was, we loved her four other wonderful novels.

Other than that: have a nice weekend. Don't wake me, I plan on sleeping in.