Millions readers in New York: Please join us tonight at McNally Jackson bookstore in Manhattan to celebrate the release of The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books. I’ll be joined by my co-editor Jeff Martin, as well as Reif Larsen and some of the book’s other contributors, including Millions staff writers Garth Risk Hallberg and Emily St. John Mandel. We’re looking forward to seeing you there!
Tonight’s the Night!
Tintin Ruling
Good news for Tintinologists, if not guards of political correctness: Tintin in the Congo has been deemed “not racist” by a Belgian judicial adviser.
87 Years Delayed: New Zora Neale Hurston
New York Magazine has an excerpt up from Zora Neale Hurston‘s long-lost manuscript, Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo, the first-person account of Cudjo Lewis, the only living survivor of the final slave ship to land in America. Barracoon will finally, 87 years later, be published next week.
“Can you lend me [Goethe’s] Theory of Colors for a few weeks? It is an important work. His last things are insipid” -Beethoven
Booktryst offers a peek at famed German novelist and (apparently) amateur physicist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Theory of Colors, revealing Goethe as a sort of proto-Kandinsky.
Truth with a Dragon
Jeff Vandermeer writes for the Los Angeles Times about autobiographical influence in fantasy and sci-fi and argues that “there’s little or no difference in process or results compared to “normal” fiction, except that sometimes you end up with a dragon in your story and sometimes you don’t.” Pair with Alex Trivilino‘s account of “binge-reading” Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy.
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When Good Things Happen to Bad People
When Good Things Happen to Bad People: Heart Advice for Difficult Times. On one of our favorite industry blogs, The Rejectionist weighs in on one of publishing’s perennial problems: what to do when someone really foul ends up being way more successful than you are.
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“What is your useful skill in a tangible situation?”
First there were cupcakes, then donuts, and now toast. At The Pacific Standard, John Gravois discovers the surprisingly emotional and personal reason for why toast is the latest artisan food trend.