Out today are Me and the Devil by Nick Tosches; Raised from the Ground by Jose Saramago; Climates, a newly translated novel from 1928 by French writer Andre Maurois; Spilt Milk by Brazilian writer Chico Buarque; and Alan Light’s The Holy or the Broken about a Leonard Cohen song that Jeff Buckley made famous.
Tuesday New Release Day: Tosches, Saramago, Maurois, Buarque, Light
Wild Things
Where The Wild Things Are, the beloved children’s story written and illustrated by Maurice Sendak, arrives in US theaters in cinematic form this Friday, October 16th; see the trailer here. The excellent Spike Jonze (Adaptation, Being John Malkovich) directs.
Joshua James
If you like your music country/folk-ish with a difference, Joshua James new album Build Me This might be of interest. No Depression, the roots music blog, describes the album as a hybrid of “chain-gang chants, country-fuzz rave-ups, gospel rafter-raisers, southern blues grinds, and civil war camp songs.” Try not to be taken aback by the Jared Leto-in-a-mud-mask cover art.
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That’s a Mouthful
The longest word in the English language is not antidisestablishmentarianism. Nor is it supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. It is, in fact, the chemical name of titin, the largest known protein. And now you can listen to all 189,819 letters of it being pronounced. Bonus points if you work it into your next conversation.
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La Buena Educacion
At The Paris Review Daily, Pedro Almodóvar tallies the elements of cinematic comedy, which include good timing, “rapid-fire dialogue” and rehearsals that draw out spontaneous performances from actors.
“How an ordinary Asian fell in love with The Smiths”
You may not expect much from a write-up about The Smiths’ new collected box set, Complete, but that’s about to change. In a phenomenal piece on the relationship between racial (in particular Asian) otherness and the UK band’s music, Sukhdev Sandhu explains how Morrissey’s “lyrics and persona mapped out a structure of feeling that spoke to my own floundering selfhood.”
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