“Language starts to shut down the strength and power and strangeness of what it means to be a person in the world.” At The Rumpus, Ben Marcus discusses how he uses language in his writing and his new short story collection, Leaving the Sea (featured in our 2014 book preview.) Pair with: Our own Adam Boretz’s interview with Marcus and our review of The Flame Alphabet.
Ben Marcus’s Language
Tuesday New Release Day: Shamsie; Kobek; Bordas; Goldstein; Sexton; Barzini; Yoon
Out this week: Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie; The Future Won’t Be Long by Jarett Kobek; How to Behave in a Crowd by Camille Bordas; The World Broke in Two by Bill Goldstein; A Kind of Freedom by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton; Things That Happened Before the Earthquake by Chiara Barzini; and The Mountain by Paul Yoon. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
Banana Yoshimoto Interview
Banana Yoshimoto, whose novel The Lake was recently shortlisted for the Man Asian Prize, does an interview with Melville House.
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The Science of Language and Creativity
At the Philadelphia Inquirer, neurologists look at cases where serious brain injury has actually brought about higher levels of creativity in artists, particularly where linguistic ability is harmed. “Language is the bully of the brain,” [one neurologist] says. “It takes up its own space and if something else gets crowded out, too bad.” (via Book Bench)
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A Poet’s Debut
Page Views
Sometime Millions contributor and New York Daily News editorial staffer Alexander Nazaryan has kicked off the Daily News‘ new literary blog, Page Views. Nazaryan says, “you may not think of the tabloid as a particularly literary format, but we are going to challenge your assumptions of what constitutes literary/cultural reporting in this town.” His first post, “Don’t tell me the book is dead,” went live this morning.
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Indie Lit Wish List
The recently-revived HTMLGiant previewed twelve indie lit books being published in 2017, and the list is a terrific supplement to our own Great 2017 Book Preview.
Robot Virginia Woolf?
You must obey (and read) your robot overlords! As if winning a literary award wasn’t already hard enough, a story co-authored by computers just made it through at least one round of judging at the Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award competition in Japan. But don’t worry, you haven’t lost your job quite yet–the good news is that the programs still have “some problems … such as character descriptions.”
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As Good as Gold
Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient won the Golden Man Booker Prize, the one-off award celebrating the best work of fiction from the last five decades of the prize. About the prize, Ondaatje said “I wish in fact that those of us on this Man Booker list had been invited to propose and speak about what we felt were the overlooked classics—in order to enlarge what ought to be read, as opposed to relying on the usual suspects.” Read the rest of his illuminating and gracious speech over at Literary Hub.