Did you know that a new Jonathan Safran Foer book is coming out this week? We didn’t until we saw a mention of it at Kottke. More surprising is the form of the book itself. Foer has created a new work called Tree of Codes by cutting out sections of one of his favorite books, The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Shulz. The die-cut, Kindle-proof volume is the first major title by London-based Visual Editions. Vanity Fair has more.
Jonathan Safran Foer, Cut Up
Contemporary Arabic Novels
Claudia Roth Pierpont writes about the contemporary Arabic novel in this week’s New Yorker, highlighting Iraqi, Palestinian, and Egyptian examples.
Rachman’s Single
Tom Rachman, author of Millions Hall of Famer The Imperfectionists, has a new short story out as a Kindle Single: “The Bathtub Spy.”
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Please, Sir, I’d Like Some More Time
Recommended Reading: a piece from the New York Review of Books blog on modern attention spans and what they mean for literature. Hint: it’s not looking too promising. Tim Parks closes with a prediction that “the novel of elegant, highly distinct prose, of conceptual delicacy and syntactical complexity, will tend to divide itself up into shorter and shorter sections, offering more frequent pauses where we can take time out. The larger popular novel, or the novel of extensive narrative architecture, will be ever more laden with repetitive formulas, and coercive, declamatory rhetoric to make it easier and easier, after breaks, to pick up, not a thread, but a sturdy cable.”
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Waywords and Meansigns
Recommended listening: Waywords and Meansigns, a new project that’s set out to record Finnegans Wake in its entirety and set it to music. The complete work will be released on May 4th, but there are already a few samples available online.
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Custom Litographs
Litographs is a Massachusetts-based company that uses literature as inspiration for their designs. The text becomes the basis for the design. (Check out this example for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.) They’re launching a new Kickstarter campaign on Tuesday in which you can make a custom Litograph with whatever text you want. Pretty cool, right?
Chicken or Hen?
“Katrina Dodson has spent more time thinking about the word ‘chicken’ than you have spent thinking about anything.” The Stranger sits down with Katrina Dodson, translator of Clarice Lispector’s The Complete Stories. Pair with Dodson’s Year in Reading.
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Barrelhouse’s Wrestling Issue
Barrelhouse recently revamped their website, but that’s not even the most exciting news out of the D.C.-based literary outfit this week. No, sir. The most exciting news is that the magazine’s newest online issue is “focused on the theme of 1980s professional wrestling.” The list of contributors includes Aaron Burch, Matthew Duffus, and Jeannine Mjoseth.
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The Elements of Style
Alexander Chee invites Ann Beattie, Matt Bell, and five other writers to reflect on the usage of the present tense, “the current preferred mode of the self-taught writer.” Pair with our own Michael Bourne’s essay on grammar and Anthony Doerr.
Just in time for the holiday shopping season. As if the repackaged combo of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Everything is Illuminated isn’t enough.
No, my novel is called “Cut Up”. Burrough’s technique is called the cut-up technique.