The Wire and Treme creator David Simon tells The Baltimore Sun that he’s going to work on an HBO miniseries about the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The project will be based on Taylor Branch’s multi–part biographies of the civil rights leader.
David Simon to Adapt MLK Biography for HBO Miniseries
Chronic City, Come Alive
In an interview with Jonathan Lethem, the NBCC’s Jane Ciabaratti offers, inter alia, a sympathetic reading of Chronic City; both have more affection than Kakutani did for what Lethem calls “the claptrap contraption plot I invented.” Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal, in a flash of inspiration, assigns the book to the estimable Alexander Theroux – the only non-Latin writer who can credibly use the word “prosopographical” in a review. (But, attn editor: “not a jot” twice? in subsequent paragraphs?) A marathon bi-borough reading of the entire novel continues tonight at McNally Jackson.
“You call that nice? // I call it haiku.”
Recommended Reading: Two new poems by Just Saying author Rae Armantrout.
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Writers and Their Snacks
Franz Kafka liked to drink milk as he wrote. Walt Whitman liked a breakfast of cold meat and oysters. Marcel Proust was an espresso addict. This info graphic from The New York Times raises the question: what do you snack on as you write? You might also want to snack as you read that article, so check out our own Lydia Kiesling‘s piece from last April.
On Reading and Re-Reading Autoportrait
When our own Mark O’Connell reviewed Edouard Levé’s Autoportrait, he wrote that the book compels you to keep reading because “the more Levé says, the more facts he sets down, the more you realize he hasn’t said.” But what if at the end, you’re meant to reread the book, too? Over at Words Without Borders, Jan Steyn says “the only way to get a better idea of how [these sentences] fit together is to keep reading, and reading, until the end, and then perhaps to read the book again.”
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Platform Proliferation
The Atlantic points out another consequence of the digital revolution: books now come in multiple formats at dozens of price points. A symptom of publisher panic? A boon for readers?
The Weight of Each Other’s History
Recommended Reading: On Audre Lorde’s archive in Berlin.