Sean Manning of the Talking Covers blog spoke with a bunch of authors, editors and artists to take a long, close look at the work of Lorraine Louie, the designer “who came up with the uniform, De Stijl layout” of the inimitable Vintage Contemporaries. And while on the topic of book covers, check out Tammy Fortin’s “New Covers for Old Classics” series she put together for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Covers That Were; Covers That Could’ve Been
A Deliberate Strategy
At The Rumpus, Catherine Brady interviews Daniel Alarcón, who recently came out with a new novel. Alarcón talks about his love of Roberto Bolaño and the paradox of writing about prison, among other things. (You could also read Jeff Peer’s review of the author's new book.)
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You Call Those Facts? These Are Facts.
“Since scientific knowledge is still growing by a factor of ten every 50 years, it should not be surprising that lots of facts people learned in school and universities have been overturned and are now out of date,” writes Ronald Bailey in his review of Samuel Arbesman’s The Half-life of Facts.
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A Big Week for Wells Tower
Wells Tower is having himself a great week, and it stands to reason that when he’s having a good week, we’re all having one as well. After all, we get to ponder the potential of the script Tower wrote for You Shall Know Our Velocity, an upcoming film based on Dave Eggers’s novel of the same name. We also get to read Tower’s Garden & Gun piece on “the nervous work of owning – and finally loving – a Chihuahua.” And as though that wasn’t enough already, we also get to savor Tower’s gripping feature story in the latest GQ, “Who Wants to Shoot an Elephant?”
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On DJ Mad Eskimo, Tumivut, Eskimocentricity, and Tagoona
Recommended Reading: Justin Nobel’s profile of the Inuit rap scene entitled (wait for it) “Ice, Ice Baby.”
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RIP Mavis Gallant
The Canadian writer Mavis Gallant passed away on Tuesday morning at the age of 91. A frequent New Yorker contributor, Gallant published two novels and ten volumes of short fiction in her lifetime, one of which, Home Truths, won the Governor General’s Award. The Globe and Mail's obituary describes her as having “a journalist’s nose, a cinematographer’s eye and a novelist’s imagination.” (Andrew Saikali wrote about Gallant for The Millions back in 2008.)
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Are You Going to Become an Old Man Here?
We've all read some version of this story before. In the newest iteration of Listicles for People Just Like You over at McSweeney's, Rufi Thrope helpfully provides Ten Signs Your Name is James and You Are Teaching English at a Fancy Boarding School.
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The Art of Stealing
Richard Cohen writes about plagiarizing real people’s identities and the dirty side of writing. As Milan Kundera writes in The Art of the Novel, “The novelist destroys the house of his life and uses its stones to build the house of his novel.”
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The Old-New Journalism
"The repetitions, the ellipses, the onomatopoeia: All the markers of Wolfe’s stylistic DNA were adaptive mutations to a competitive climate, search-engine optimization for the typewriter age." Here's an interview with Tom Wolfe about his new novel, Back to Blood, which is receiving mixed reviews.
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