Polish filmmaker Piotr Dumala spent three years working on his half-hour-long expressionistic adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and the result is a “destructive animation” that’s at once unnerving and beautiful. However in case you’re more pressed for time, you can also get your animated Russian literature fix by checking out Natalia Berezovaya and Svetlana Petrova’s two-minute-long animation for Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita.
Animated Russian Classics
Pioneering Television
Make sure to set the DVR to C-SPAN2 this weekend because Konstantin Kakaes will be talking about our own e-book original The Pioneer Detectives at 7:30 p.m. EST on Sunday. Also, listen to Kakaes discuss what happens when scientists are faced with a discovery that challenges their fundamental beliefs in gravity on the New America Foundation podcast.
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“The Sam Weller Bump”
“Bigger than the Zuckerberg Bump, bigger even than the Colbert Bump or the Oprah Bump—arguably the most historic bump in English publishing is the Sam Weller Bump.” A look at the surprising and overwhelming success of Dicken‘s first novel, The Pickwick Papers, from The Paris Review.
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The Texas of Africa
“Nigeria did fracture once, however, and it is this story that Chinua Achebe, a giant of African letters, tells. His memoir of the moment describes when the country, yoked together artificially by British colonizers, split apart at a cost of more than a million lives.” The New York Times Book Review on the writer’s There Was A Country.
Revisiting ‘The Decameron’ in Quarantine
Elyse Martin examines how Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron—a collection of "medieval Italian sex stories"—shows that storytelling is integral to our survival.
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Qiu Miaojin and the Existential Wonder of the Immigrant Narrative
Ocean Vuong recommends Last Words from Montmarte by Qiu Miaojin, a series of letters that explores culture, language, and gender.
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Charlotte Brontë’s Voice
While writing about Charlotte Brontë’s voice, Bee Wilson pays special attention to the ways the Jane Eyre author “makes a gothic fairy tale about a plain governess so raw and exhilarating.”
Mislabeled
Can writers transcend race? LaTanya McQueen argues that labeling fiction as minority gets in the way of the story at The Missouri Review blog. Also, see our essay on the racial and gender barriers in the publishing industry.
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