Boss Fight Books is a new series in the mold of the classic 33 1/3 model. In lieu of covering music albums, however, each Boss Fight book “will take a critical, creative, historical, and personal look at a single classic video game.” The first titles in the series will investigate Earthbound and Galaga, and they should be out by next December and January, respectively.
Boss Fight Books
David Mitchell’s Opera; David Mitchell’s Japanese Books
Working with composer Michel van der Aa, David Mitchell has written an “occult opera” entitled “Sunken Garden.” Meanwhile, the former head of buying at Waterstone’s has shared the Cloud Atlas author’s list of his favorite Japanese books. (h/t Sarah Emily Duff)
“It was the perfect literary crime”
Amid recent discussion here and elsewhere about what to do about bad reviews, in the Washington Post Chris Bohjalian writes of the time he resisted the temptation to pan a book by the teacher who almost crushed his nascent literary career.
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New Vessel Press Brings International Literature to the US
New Vessel Press is a new publisher specializing in the translation of foreign literature into the English language. Translator Ross Uffberg and journalist Michael Z. Wise started it last year. Next month, they’ll publish their first book, The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra by Pedro Mairal, and they have plans for quite a few more as well.
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August: Osage County Gets a Trailer
The first trailer has been released for the cinematic adaptation of Tracy Letts’s Pulitzer-winning play August: Osage County. Here are two of my favorite scenes (one, two) from the play to whet your appetite. The film, which is directed by John Wells, is scheduled for a November release.
TQC Launches E-Book Series
The Quarterly Conversation is kicking off its new “Long Essays” e-book series with Lady Chatterley’s Brother: Why Nicholson Baker Can’t Write About Sex, and Why Javier Marias Can.
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Visualizing Don Quixote
Visual Editions wants to send photographer Jacob Robinson to La Mancha… by way of camper van. Along the way, he’ll be tasked with “captur[ing] the spirit of Don Quixote” on film and combining his shots with text from Miguel de Cervantes’s novel in order to create a re-imagined, “faithful and contemporary” edition. You can find out more on the effort’s Kickstarter page.
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Borges and Bergoglio
In an interview with America Magazine, Pope Francis admits that the authors he most admires are Fyodor Dostoevsky, Johann Hölderlin, The Betrothed author Alessandro Manzoni, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. He also goes on to share an interesting anecdote about his compatriot Jorge Luis Borges: “In the end I decided to send Borges two stories written by [the secondary school] boys [I was teaching]. I knew his secretary, who had been my piano teacher. And Borges liked those stories very much. And then he set out to write the introduction to a collection of these writings.”