It’s rare that you find someone as eclectic as William Boyd. Not only did the British writer’s new play (based on two of Chekhov’s short stories) debut in London this week, his upcoming novel will star none other than James Bond. (If you’re wondering, his friend Daniel Craig is not how he pictures the superspy.)
Moonlighting as Ian Fleming
Photographing Reality
Do author photographs change the way we see them (or the way we read their works)? At Lit Hub, stare into the souls of a few iconic writers and read about how author photos impact us. You could also read our review of Street Seen, which maps out how photography and reality became intertwined.
Young and Old
After Herzog came out, Saul Bellow began the slow transformation from young Bellow into old Bellow, from the critically adored but little-known writer to the Nobel Prize winner whose views were solicited on every topic. In The New Yorker, Louis Menand writes about a new biography of the author, which tackles his early career. Related: our own Emily St. John Mandel on Bellow’s novel The Bellarosa Connection.
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Cleaved in Two
"As I let the shotgun drop the butt hit the bricks and the second shell fired into me..." This excerpt from Homero Airdjis's upcoming The Child Poet, is fraught with elements of tension and discovery. Something of a künstlerroman, the book tracks Airdjis's artistic and poetic development from his boyhood through the present day.
We Are Many. We Are Everywhere.
Roxane Gay rounded up a massive, crowdsourced list of writers of color. While the list is by no means exhaustive, it might be a necessary measure in proving “the world of letters is far more diverse than the publishing climate would lead us to believe.”
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Duck and Cover
"In my mind, the encircled bird on the cover of the 1978 Pocket Books edition of Play It As It Lays immediately recalled another: the mockingjay pin given to Katniss Everdeen at the start of Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games." At Paper Monument: the importance of book covers.
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Listen Up!
Don DeLillo spoke in Chicago last week, after receiving the Carl Sandburg Literary Award. Adam Daniels, our intrepid #LitBeat correspondent, reports.
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