Amusement has greeted the news that an extract from Lydia Davis's new translation of Madame Bovary appears in the September issue of Playboy. "Who's in between the covers of Playboy now?", tittered the Guardian. "Madame Bovary." The Independent called her "Playboy's literary Playmate of the Month". Macy Halford at the New Yorker's books blog at least tried to be witty: "I am not very interested in Playboy, but I am interested in the female form. That is, in one female - Lydia Davis - operating in top form in her new translation of Madame Bovary". Even Ms Halford resorted to the obligatory tale of embarrassment when buying the magazine at a kiosk.
These people ought to be grateful that Playboy is getting bookish again. Last year, it published sections of The Original of Laura, the latest Nabokov discovery. Nabokov was a Playboy interviewee in the 1960s, as was Jean-Paul Sartre. If the magazine pays less attention to literature now, it is because the culture in general does. Touchingly, it bills Flaubert's story as "The most scandalous novel of all time", which wasn't true even in 1857, when the author was prosecuted for outraging public morals. If Lydia Davis had offered a top-form translation of The 120 Days of Sodom (1795), Playboy would have been scandalized.