In his look ahead to interesting books coming out in 2011, Scott Esposito includes the book I co-edited, The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books, which features pieces by Jonathan Lethem, Rivka Galchen, Benjamin Kunkel, and several other great writers and is due out in March.
Early Buzz
“Kafka was a son of Prague to his phthisic fingertips”
“Repressed homosexual yearnings certainly would account for some of the more striking of [Franz] Kafka’s darker preoccupations,” writes John Banville in his investigation of the writer’s personal life and psychology.
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More Anticipated Books
The eagle-eyed Scott Esposito spots fall publication dates for volumes I and II of Murakami‘s IQ84…and for Helen DeWitt‘s new novel (!), Lightning Rods, due out from New Directions.
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Gaiman TV
We thought we had a better chance of seeing Odin than Neil Gaiman’s American Gods on TV, but after the HBO deal fell through, the novel is finally being adapted for the small screen by FremantleMedia. Bonus: Gaiman’s Anansi Boys is also being adapted into a BBC miniseries by RED. To brush up on Gaiman’s interest in mythology, read our review of The Ocean at the End of the Lane.
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A Gut-Wrenching Account and an Ethical Nightmare
A dissection of Jonathan Franzen’s recent New Yorker essay on David Foster Wallace finds Franzen’s wires showing.
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Meet Your Professors
You’ve probably met them all: the three kinds of English professors, as defined by McSweeney’s. Our own Nick Ripatrazone writes about the fictional lives of high school teachers.
Ancient Welsh Book To Be Made Available Online
A 13th century Welsh book originally written by monks on pages of animal skin has finally been made available online thanks to the country’s National Library. The ancient Book of Aneirin contains the Gododdin, one of the oldest poems ever written in the language.
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Shakespeare in Asia
“It’s fair to say Shakespeare is having a cultural moment in Asia, with a “boom” of new film adaptations and dramatic stagings,” and the Royal Shakespeare Company just received 1.5 million pounds to keep that boom going by translating all of the Bard’s plays into Mandarin. Melville House has the full story, and it pairs well with both this diagram of a translated book’s usual lifespan and this discussion of Shakespeare’s best plays.
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Slashing the Sestina
What’s better than slash fiction about your favorite authors? Slash sestinas about your favorite authors. At The Toast, Jade Sylvan writes three sestinas pairing Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, and J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. “Two friends, writers, men,/in the most flamboyantly seedy café on the Left/Bank. Scott can’t get past the second word: ‘Write.'”
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