At the Times Literary Supplement, Raymond Tallis reviews Hallucinations, a new book by Oliver Sacks that defines “sensational consciousness.”
Visionary
Cyberpunk/Cyberspace
“I can’t remember another single work of art ever having had that immediate and powerful an impact, which of course makes the experience quite impossible to describe. As I experienced it, it drove me out of my wretched mind … I do know that I knew immediately that my sense of what science fiction could be had been permanently altered.” William Gibson on having his world rocked (and artistic sensibilities altered) by Chris Marker’s 1962 short film La Jetée.
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Highly Recommended
The New York Times recommends eight new books it thinks you’ll like, including Alan Moore‘s Jerusalem, which we reviewed last month, and two novels – Jonathan Lethem‘s A Gambler’s Anatomy, and Jade Chang‘s The Wangs vs. the World – that were on our own most-anticipated October list.
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Draw It With Your Eyes Closed (On The Internet)
Draw It With Your Eyes Closed, which has been a fixture on our Top Ten lists of late, has launched a companion website to “expand on the previously published content, allowing a broader range of teachers, students, and artists to access, share, and contribute to the project.”
A National Mission
The new poet laureate of Canada wants to clue his readers in to the prevalence of poetry in their everyday lives. “People often don’t realize they’re surrounded by poetry,” he said in an interview with The Globe and Mail. “At the very least, it’s in the songs they listen to.”
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An Autocrat’s Guide to World Cup Qualification
Recommended reading: What do you get the guy you can’t get anything else–the one with his own oil-rich country–like the Emir of Qatar? The LA Review recommends starting with the World Cup.
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It’s Late
Recent Pulitzer laureate Adam Johnson has a new short story in Esquire, and it’s a doozy, invoking drone strikes, Obama and Kurt Cobain in the course of its tightly-knit plot. Sample quote: “I wonder if the First Lady was the one to turn off the machine.”