Ever since Pulphead, we can’t get enough of John Jeremiah Sullivan, so we’re happy to hear he’s at work on his next book, The Prime Minister of Paradise. Sullivan will tell the story of Christian Priber, a German American who tried to establish a utopia in 18th century South Carolina. “This man, he really represented the height of the enlightenment at the time,” Sullivan said during a recent interview at Notre Dame. No word on an official release date yet, but it’s already being optioned for film by Scott Rudin.
New JJS on the Way
Rejecting Tidy Narratives
For Lenny, Lidia Yuknavitch talks about suffering, art, and her path to writing. “I believe in art the way other people believe in God,” she says. For more of her writing, check out her Millions essay on grief that births art.
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Tartt on TV
Boris is coming to the big screen. Nina Jacobson, the producer behind The Hunger Games, has acquired the rights to adapt Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. Whether it will be a film or TV miniseries is still up for question, but if the actors need any help getting into character, check out our essay on identifying with Theo and learn how to tweet like Boris.
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Life and Fate
Kenneth Branagh and David Tennant star in an eight-hour dramatization of Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. Completed in 1960, and centered around the bloody battle of Stalingrad, the novel was deemed so dangerous by the KGB that the book itself was arrested. BBC’s excited, and all the episodes are available to download.
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J.R.R. Tolkien Traced “Morse” to “Walrus”
Jonathan Dent offers a fascinating look at one of J.R.R. Tolkien’s most challenging assignments for the Oxford English Dictionary. Apparently as a young philologist, Tolkien was tasked with tracing the etymology of “walrus” – a tricky word “of disputed origin that had all but entirely replaced the earlier English name morse since its first appearance in English in the late 1600s.”
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n+1: The Singles
Millions fave n+1 has begun putting out a series of mini-ebooks via Kindle Singles. Three are available thus far: “Octomom and the Politics of Babies” by Mark Grief, “Gatsby in New Delhi” by Siddhartha Deb, and “Argentinidad” by Benjamin Kunkel.
Confessions of a Theorist
“This is the odd space these Theory Generation novels inhabit, making them peculiar novels of ideas. Their writers have read enough Theory at a young enough age to be in continued thrall to its power; they do justice to the disorienting shock those texts once had, and perhaps still have. Yet they are old enough to ironize (tenderly or bitterly) that power.” Are you a member of the theory generation?
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Supply and Demand
A London book dealer declares “The Great Book Glut of 2010.”
If you read German and can’t wait or want an alternative perspective, consider Ursula Naumann’s longform essay “Pribers Paradies” (Eichborn, 2001).
… and please feel also free to visit Germany to see the exhibition of ACC Galerie Weimar and the Municipal Museums of Zittau called “KINGDOM PARADISE – Christian Gottlieb Prieber and Social Utopias of the present”.
Running from 31 May until 9 August 2015 in WEIMAR and from 1 July to 30 October 2016 in ZITTAU.
There is a huge community of curators, artists, and art historians already working on Priber and his ideas and story – looking forward to opening their exhibition in two weeks on 30th of May, 8pm at ACC Galerie Weimar.