China Miéville recorded a podcast with Lapham’s Quarterly editor Aidan Flax-Clark.
Miéville in Conversation
The Art of Fiction with Imre Kertész
The Paris Review’s interview with Hungarian author (and recent retiree) Imre Kertész is up on their website now, and to celebrate the occasion the magazine is offering a $10 discount on subscriptions. The promo code is good all week long.
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The Revolution Will Not Be E-Read
According to some new research conducted by ebook retailer Kobo, the digital reading revolution (if it still exists) is being powered by prolific readers who are primarily female and older than forty-five. The study asserts that women make up almost seventy-five percent of “active” e-readers, defined as those who spend more than thirty minutes per day reading. What does all of this mean? Who knows, but keep reading.
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Staking Out the Best Real Estate
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The First Banned Book in America
Thomas Morton, an English businessman who had a knack for riling up Puritans, was the author of the first book explicitly banned in the United States.
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LA Times interviews Jonathan Lethem
At Jacket Copy, Carolyn Kellogg talks with Jonathan Lethem about his new novel Chronic City “I love to dwell in the space of a novel — I don’t find writing uncomfortable, it’s something I really love doing. Writing a long novel, especially, it means that I’m creating this whole other set of people that I’m interested in, and this whole other world I get to go into, and I try to stay there. I try to go every day, not just to see the word count amass, which is helpful, but because then my subconscious is kind of living there.”
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Charles Yu on Rejecting the Grand Narrative
Yu reflects on the rise in anti-Asian harassment and violence, and how storytelling can resist the dehumanization that stems from erasure.
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Visible Men
Now is as good a time as there ever will be to go and check out the Art Institute of Chicago. A new exhibit, “Invisible Man: Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison in Harlem,” combines the photography of Parks, who eventually went on to gain a measure of fame in the ’70s as a Hollywood movie director, and the writing of Ralph Ellison, in an attempt to offer a portrait of Harlem in the post-World War II years.
The Gone Girl With The Dragon Tattoo On The Train
Someone’s finally done it, and it’s our own Emily St. John Mandel, to boot: over at FiveThirtyEight, Mandel crunches the numbers on books with the word “girl” in the title, concluding that we may not have reached peak girl yet. (Also 65% of the time, the girl in question is actually a woman.) Nonetheless, if you’re looking to go rogue, check out our guide about how to title every book you ever write.