This week has been full of news about unorthodox children’s book authors. First, there was Keith Richards’s picture book, and now an Australian academic claims that Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-sung wrote children’s books, too. “I was astounded that children’s books (purportedly) written by Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-sung were vastly more readable than one would expect from any political leader in the democratic west, still less a severe authoritarian,” doctoral student Christopher Richardson said.
Kim Lit
Save the Languages
Researchers at Comanche Nation College and Texas Tech University are creating a digital archive to reconstruct the Comanche language before its 25 remaining speakers die out. Meanwhile, researchers from Moscow State University and the Russian Academy of Sciences have recorded audio and video footage of twenty isolated Alaskans who speak a unique form of the Russian language. (Bonus: An Australian researcher recently uncovered a whole new Aboriginal dialect.)
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The Best Comics of 2013
Want to get rid of some of that holiday money? Timothy Callahan’s list of The Best Comics of 2013 is a good place to start.
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Major Shelf Envy
The Guardian has photos of A Little Life author Hanya Yanagihara's New York City apartment and its 12,000 – yes 12,000 – books. Pair with our interview with her from 2015: “It was the worst—the bleakest, the most physically exhausting, the most emotionally enervating—writing experience I'd had. I felt, and feared, that the book was controlling me, somehow, as if I'd somehow become possessed by it.”
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Michael Lewis Goes to the Movies (Again)
Michael Lewis has been tapped by Warner Brothers to adapt his first book Liar’s Poker for the big screen. This will be the third movie based on one of Lewis’ books.
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New Takes on Proust
Add this to the roster of great literary takedowns. Apparently Evelyn Waugh once wrote the following about Proust: “Nobody told me he was a mental defective. He had no sense of time.” (This stands in stark contrast with the views of Aleksandar Hemon, who wrote in a recent Year in Reading piece that Swann's Way is “one of those miraculous books that gets better with every re-reading.”)
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A Bookstore of Common Prayer
Common dreams, common bookstores: "I went home with...the BookWoman bumper sticker, which reads: 'Support Your Feminist Bookstore — She Supports You.'"
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How to Get Diversity in Publishing
Literary Hub has an excerpt of an essay by Chris Jackson, Editor in Chief of Random House's One World imprint on how we can actually achieve diversity in the publishing industry. "What’s the payoff of having a more diverse workforce? Well, there’s obviously the moral case to be made—and that’s a case that I think applies to any industry. But in book publishing, I think we have a special obligation, given our central role in shaping the culture." And he shares the origin story of how he started to work with Ta-Nehisi Coates.