Late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs has been immortalized in books, documentaries, and TV specials, with rumors that his story might eventually make its way to the big screen. Now you can add graphic novel to that list; on Tuesday PC Magazine noted the release of The Zen of Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs Goes Graphic
Burroughs’ Selected Letters
Recommended Reading: The selected letters of William S. Burroughs at The Paris Review Daily. Read his correspondences with family and writers Allen Ginsberg and Norman Mailer. Pair with Jonathan Clarke’s article on why an author’s biography will never be more important than their writing.
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Dmitry Samarov on Writers No One Reads
Hack author Dmitry Samarov is this week’s guest blogger at Writers No One Reads (which we’ve mentioned before). In his first post, Samarov takes a look at the work of Willard Motley, who grew up in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood in the early 1900s, and is most well-known for his 1947 bestseller, Knock On Any Door.
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A New Tradition
The New Yorker has launched an online-only series dedicated to the novella, featuring longer works of fiction the magazine isn’t able to fit into print. “The novella is not, usually, an expanded story. Rather, it is a contracted novel, in which the omissions cover much ground. It is more ambitious than a story, denser and more gemlike than a novel.” Callan Wink’s In Hindsight launches the series, with an interview with the author.
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Uncanny Valley
“I was performing an experiment. I wanted to see [how] one of the greatest minds in history would be affected by an experience he had never had before: imbibing a suitable dose of clinical LSD in a desert setting of great magnificence, and then adding to that various kinds of entertainment.” An oral account of a 1975 trip to Death Valley with Michel Foucault.
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River Phoenix’s Final Film
In 1993, River Phoenix was working on Dark Blood, an independent film that was supposed to be the underdog surprise of the year. But when Phoenix died three weeks before shooting was supposed to wrap, the project stopped in its tracks. Now, almost 20 years later, the original director and editor are piecing the bits together, and they plan on screening it at the Netherlands Film Festival in September.
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Thoughts of the Enemy
In the new Granta, Adam Johnson writes about the mind-bending experience of traveling to North Korea, an experience which informed his Pulitzer-winning novel The Orphan Master’s Son. Perhaps the saddest anecdote — and there are a lot of sad anecdotes — is the one about the North Korean tour guide who couldn’t believe the author didn’t want to buy knockoff goods.
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Lorin Stein Named Editor of the Paris Review
Garth recently posited that Dave Eggers would be a great, if counter-intuitive, replacement for Philip Gourevitch at the Paris Review. Instead, the Paris Review has announced today the equally admirable appointment of FSG editor Lorin Stein to head up the venerable literary magazine. The announcement.
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Trailer for Packing for Mars by Mary Roach
Part 10: Space Hygiene: “Unfortunately, removing the helmet created a situation where the body odors were forced out of the neck of the pressure suit…” Check out this funny and artful trailer for Packing for Mars by Mary Roach.
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