Picador’s Gabrielle Gantz is holding monthly conversations with bloggers, and she posts the results on the publishing house’s fantastic Tumblr. Here she interviews Aidan Flax-Clark, associate editor of Lapham’s Quarterly, and gets him to discuss the similarities between his research and The Matrix.
Does This Mean Lewis Lapham is Morpheus?
The Notebook Takes the Stage
Nicholas Sparks is working on a Broadway musical adaptation of The Notebook. The question this raises, of course, is whether or not current internet meme-célèbre Ryan Gosling will reprise his starring role.
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David Byrne Talks Music
David Byrne, Talking Heads frontman, sits down with Smithsonian Magazine’s Seth Colter Walls to discuss his life, musical tastes, and his latest book, How Music Works. You can also read an excerpt from the book over here. (Also, you know, just because I have to...)
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From Pen to Publishing House
A droll diagram mapping the tumultuous birth of a book.
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Permeated by Violence
Ratik Asokan reviews Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador by Horacio Castellanos Moya, a story about dealing with the violence that permeates El Salvador’s culture. “Fiction, unlike journalism, has allowed Moya to express the frustration and existential terror of living in a society thoroughly permeated by violence.” Pair with our reviews of Moya’s Tyrant Memory and The Dream of My Return.
Let’s Get a Move On, Scientists
David Graeber, author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years (which was brilliantly reviewed by Benjamin Kunkel in the LRB recently), wonders why the world doesn’t yet have any flying cars. It’s 2012, people!
Tuesday New Release Day: d’Ambrosio; Erpenbeck; Pericoli; Dueñas; Boland; Brecht; Munro
New this week: Loitering by Charles d’Ambrosio; The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck; Windows on the World, a collection of Paris Review essays illustrated by Matteo Pericoli (Karl Ove Knausgaard's contribution is excerpted here); The Heart Has Its Reasons by María Dueñas; A Woman Without a Country by Eavan Boland; Love Poems by Bertolt Brecht; and Family Furnishings, a new selection of short stories by Nobel laureate Alice Munro. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great Second-half 2014 Book Preview.
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The Relevance of Plasma
The vigilant excavators at Longform have dug up a fairly old piece, written by the essayist Jo Ann Beard, on a time in her life taken up by cagey dogs, vanishing husbands and the plasma in Saturn's rings.
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