Check out an excerpt of the Art of Fiction with Haruki Murakami from The Paris Review. If you are a Murakami fan like me, you should buy the issue and read the complete interview. If you do, you will find a discussion of Murakami’s upcoming novel Kafka on the Shore, which is due out in January. And from the British Library: “On this site you will find the British Library’s 93 copies of the 21 plays by Shakespeare printed in quarto before the theatres were closed in 1642.” (LINK)
Two Quick Links
Vonnegut and Celine
Jerome Weeks has an interesting post up at his blog about the impact of Louis-Ferdinand Celine's novels Journey to the End of Night and Death on the Installment Plan on the work of Kurt Vonnegut.Both novels were written 30 years before Slaughterhouse: Celine was seriously wounded in battle during World War I, while Vonnegut, of course, survived the firebombing of Dresden in World War II. But Celine's fractured narrative style, in particular, had an enormous influence on Slaughterhouse (and Catch-22, as well).And in the Philly Inquirer, Carlin Romano tries to explain just why Vonnegut has been such an enduring novelist, "why Vonnegut's leaps of inventiveness satisfied so many, why his political stilettos estranged so few."
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Je est un autre: David Wojnarowicz’s Rimbaud in New York
Wojnarowicz was deeply aware of the trajectory he shared with the youthful and precocious Rimbaud.
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Indie Publisher Blogs
Richard Nash, the guy behind Brooklyn's Soft Skull Press has started a blog. Aside from writing about Soft Skull's books, Richard also plans to discuss matters of importance to small publishers. Look for his dispatches from the Frankfurt Book Fair coming soon.Another small publisher, Unbridled Books, presents its homepage in a blog-like format. Small publishers have to work hard to be heard among the media conglomerates that control most of the publishing industry. Using blogs give these little guys the opportunity to do something that their much bigger competitors have trouble doing, make individual connections with their readers.
Plagiarism in the News
My friend Nancy sent this story my way the other day. Apparently, back in 1998 a woman posted on her weblog an interesting discovery. She realized after reading the Robert Graves historical novel I, Claudius and the Richard Condon cult classic The Manchurian Candidate back to back that Condon borrowed passages from Graves' book. There has been a little bit of hype surrounding The Manchurian Candidate lately due to an impending remake of the movie and a new edition of the book with a forward by Louis Menand, so perhaps that is what caused this revalation to come to light so long after its original discovery. Menand himself notes the bizarre patchwork of styles in Condon's work and now experts are positing that Condon may have borrowed from a number of different books when writing his novel. What strikes me when reading this is that neither the author of the article nor the experts consulted seem to think this charge is particularly damning. I think maybe this stems from the fact that Condon has never been considered much more than a pulp writer anyway. Here's the full article if you want to read more.More Than Just BaseballWhere have I been? It seems that during the nearly twenty years that have passed since he penned one of the best books ever written about baseball, Nine Innings, sportswriter Daniel Okrent went on to become an editor of Life Magazine and then an editor of Time Magazine. Now he has a new book out that is in keeping with his more recent journalistic pursuits. Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center chronicles the interesting story of a landmark of entertainment in New York City. Here's what the New York Times has to say about the book, and here's an excerpt.
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Appearing Elsewhere: The 2666 Review
We at The Millions have been anticipating Roberto Bolaño's magnum opus, 2666, for months now. While I'm not convinced that a book review is capable of capturing the beauty and profound oddity of this novel, my best effort is currently featured at More Intelligent Life.Bonus link (from the archives): "Why Bolaño Matters"