Don DeLillo’s slim new volume Point Omega is out. The Wall Street Journal recently published a piece on DeLillo that explains how the movie Psycho helped inspire the book. Also new this week is Louise Erdrich’s new novel Shadow Tag
Tuesday, New Release Day
Kafka as Comedy
“When you think Franz Kafka, what comes to mind? Mitteleuropean gloom, perhaps… What you don’t think of is standup comedy.” Two young comedians are staging a new version of Kafka’s The Trial to hit the London stage next month.
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Anne Carson’s Latest
Anne Carson, author of Nox (reviewed by Jane Alison last year), has a new book out, Antigonick, in which the translator and poet collaborates with an artist and designer to produce an unconventional translation of Antigone. Unfortunately, Amanda Shubert calls it “the first book of Carson’s where … her scholarly impulse barricades textual meanings. Usually it provides a generous way in.” Yet despite its problems, Shubert notes there are still “moments of brilliance,” and indeed the act of “doing Sophocles as a graphic novel … is kind of ingenious.”
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All Apostrophes
Are you the kind of person who’d pay good money to hear a cover of Nirvana in a Chekhov play? If so, the Young Vic has your number.
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Print the future.
Clive Thompson, of Wired and The New York Times Magazine, owns a digital copy of War and Peace but had his 16,000 words of notes and annotations printed and bound into a physical book. This, he says, may be the way of the future of reading.
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