Michael Chabon takes on Finnegans Wake in The New York Review of Books. This is mandatory reading, class.
“Thus the unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude…”
Germany’s Top Literary Prize
The Georg Buechner Prize, Germany’s highest literary honor, has been awarded this year to Reinhard Jirgl, author of The Unfinished. (via AuthorScoop)
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Views of the Sandworm
Now that classic sci-fi mag Omni has risen from the Hades of publishing, editors are combing its massive archives in search of material to republish. Among that material, it turns out, are drawings of Dune homeworld Arrakis -- drawings that happen to be endorsed by none other than Frank Herbert himself.
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“Hope this is clear”
Here are some things about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle you can learn from this questionnaire: he used the word “ditto;” he reserved his greatest admiration for “men who do their duty without fuss;" and he seems to have been quite happy with being Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
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Ben Marcus’s Language
"Language starts to shut down the strength and power and strangeness of what it means to be a person in the world." At The Rumpus, Ben Marcus discusses how he uses language in his writing and his new short story collection, Leaving the Sea (featured in our 2014 book preview.) Pair with: Our own Adam Boretz's interview with Marcus and our review of The Flame Alphabet.
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Emotional Reading
Very important: what food says about literary characters.
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“Then suddenly, a bicycle”
"Since I often biked to my therapist’s, he took note of my helmet and asked how my new exercise regimen was going. It’s going great! I said. I love it! I wish I’d known earlier that I ought to bike. Now I hated going underground. It was like the death instinct to go underground, into the subway. I never realized I hated it so utterly until I didn’t have to do it anymore." On riding a bike in New York.
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