BLDGBLOG, which has “always been interested in learning how novelists see the city,” interviewed China Miéville about “the conceptual origins of the divided city featured in his… award-winning novel The City & The City,” among other things. Architects, fans of urban decay, and general lit nerds are going to have a field day with this link, I promise you.
China Miéville Interviewed by BLDGBLOG
The Female Poets of Afghanistan
Eliza Griswold’s deeply affecting profile of the female poets in Afghanistan ran last April in the New York Times Magazine, and it’s certainly worth a read if you missed it back then. For those who read it and wanted more, though, definitely check out the Pulitzer Center’s multimedia package on all of Griswold and photographer Seamus Murphy’s work, Afghanistan: On Love and Suicide.
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Norris Church Mailer dead at 61
Norris Church Mailer, widow of Norman Mailer, died yesterday at 61 following a long battle with cancer. Mark Olshaker, president of the Norman Mailer Society, wrote: “She was the pilgrim soul who captured and won Norman’s heart and mind and who shared with him the last three decades of his life.”
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Tuesday New Release Day: Hemon; Atkinson; Disabato; O’Brien; Adrian; Vermes; Sneed; Foley; Baker
New this week: The Making of Zombie Wars by Aleksandar Hemon; A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson; The Ghost Network by Catie Disabato; The Love Object by Edna O’Brien; The New World by Chris Adrian and Eli Horowitz; Look Who’s Back by Timur Vermes; Paris, He Said by Christine Sneed; Hugo & Rose by Bridget Foley; and Scavenger Loop by David Baker. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great 2015 Book Preview.
Purity from Prison
“I was interested enough in WikiLeaks, state transparency, and emergent opposition networks to do five years in prison over such things, but I wasn’t interested enough that I would have voluntarily plowed through 500 pages of badly plotted failed-marriage razzmatazz by an author who’s long past his expiration date simply in order to learn what the Great King of the Honkies thinks about all this.” Barrett Brown reviews Jonathan Franzen’s Purity from prison. Pair with our own Lydia Kiesling’s review of the book.
Place Your Bets
This year’s Nobel in literature will be announced in early October, so there’s still plenty of time to get in on the gambling! Currently leading in all the over/unders? Haruki Murakami, whose book covers we considered here.
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Carpet Reading
Poet and antiwar activist David Shook is raising money on Kickstarter. What for, you ask? He wants to rain poetry on a city with the help of a drone. (h/t Poetry Foundation)
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‘The Last Library’
A conference on the implications of Google’s proposed settlement with publishers will highlight the massive role Google’s scanning project will play in the future of books. “‘This is the last library.’ It’s going to be extremely difficult for anyone else to create a similar digital library in the future, at least under the current laws.”