In April, the University Press of Mississippi will add a volume on David Foster Wallace to its Literary Conversations Series. A taste of the interviews contained within can be found at Dalkey.
David Foster Wallace in Coversation
He’ll Ask You For a Napkin
Mallory Ortberg of The Toast, whose Ayn Rand-inspired versions of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and You’ve Got Mail we told you about a few months ago, is back it at again. Now Rand (er, I mean, Ortberg) has her sights set on the dubiously libertarian children’s classic If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. If we give you the article, you’ll probably ask us for an essay by Gary Percesepe about meeting Ayn Rand’s editor to go along with it.
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The Desk on the Floss
Stop, thief! It appears that George Eliot’s writing desk has been stolen from the Nuneaton Museum and Art Gallery in England.
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The Memory Artist
British artist Stephen Wiltshire is sketching and drawing a 19-foot long panorama of the New York City skyline. The kicker: the drawing is being produced entirely from memory following a 20-minute helicopter flight.
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The World of Books
“If they are honest with themselves, authors of color know what stories they’re supposed to tell, and know that attempts to move beyond those stories are not so often accepted.” Matthew Salesses on the danger of cultural homogeneity in the world of books, over at Literary Hub. Pair with Salesses’s Millions essay on novel writing, inciting incidents, and beginnings.
Longlisting Other Languages
PEN America has announced the longlist for its 2017 Translation Prize, including Deborah Smith for Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (see our review here), Carlos Rojas for Yan Lianke’s The Explosion Chronicles, and Victoria Cribb for Sjón‘s Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was. (We profiled Sjón’s work at length a few years back!) The winner will be announced in February of 2017.
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Douglas Adams Poem Unearthed
This month, a Brentwood School archivist unearthed a two-page poem entitled “A Dissertation on the task of writing a poem on a candle and an account of some of the difficulties thereto pertaining.” The kicker? It was written by a 17-year-old Douglas Adams, nine years before he published The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
“I feel very honoured, even if I can’t help thinking I must be a fraud”
If Nicholas Wroe’s profile of Javier Marías doesn’t get you excited to read the Spanish novelist’s work, then maybe Hari Kunzru’s Year In Reading entry from this past year will do the trick.
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