A moving tribute to Ray Bradbury on The Paris Review Daily from his one time fact checker Stephen Andrew Hiltner: “Ray Bradbury, who never went to college and was entirely library educated, had what so many of the sophisticated, MFA-carrying writers today lack: passion, vitality, emotional awareness.” Also: Wired has collected a bunch of reminiscences from science fiction writers, including Ursula K. Le Guin.
Remembering Ray Bradbury
Coldplay Loves Libraries
Nevertheless the Artiste Persisted
“A quick scan of the literature shows that the writerly gaze has been most often turned on male artists and their creative processes and passions.” Claire V Mullins aims to redirect this gaze with a list for Electric Literature of 11 novels about female artists, including Zadie Smith‘s latest, Swing Time, which we reviewed last year. Related: Elizabeth Silver on the rise of strong female characters and the death of the literary ingénue.
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The Perils of Being a Hermit
It might not be a good idea to tell this to bookish readers, but it looks like loneliness can kill you.
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Win Zak Smith’s Gravity’s Rainbow
The Quarterly Conversation is holding a contest for readers. They’ll be giving away a hardcover copy of Zak Smith’s illustrated Gravity’s Rainbow.
Weekend Links
Bat Segundo bags his biggest fish yet: John UpdikeOn their blog, the Freakonomics guys are looking for poker players to help them with an experiment, but the bigger news is that the post reveals a sequel to the bestseller is in the works.Part one of a interview with book designer Paul Buckley of Penguin Book Group – includes lots of examples of his work.John Batelle doesn’t mind that pirated copies of his book The Search are being sold on the streets of Mumbai.
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The Most Evil Children
From the Telegraph, and only four months early for Halloween, comes a list of the most evil children in literature, from Graham Green‘s Pinkie Brown to John Steinbeck‘s Cathy Ames.
“You could say that the book [A Sport and a Pastime] is a long poem to provincial France.”
In a video introduced by Paul Yoon, James Salter (who was recently interviewed by our own Sonya Chung) speaks about his time in France and his experience writing A Sport and a Pastime.
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