Recommended Listening: “I wanted to rescue the wicked stepmother,” Helen Oyeyemi said in an interview with NPR about her new book, Boy, Snow, Bird (which made our 2014 book preview.)
Saving the Wicked Stepmother
Salman Rushdie on George Orwell
Granta posts Salman Rushdie’s 1984 essay ‘Outside the Whale’ – a response to an essay by George Orwell about the political role of the artist: “If writers leave the business of making pictures of the world to politicians, it will be one of history’s great and most abject abdications.”
●
●
Joyce and Carroll
“But reading Finnegans Wake is more than a matter of collecting one’s favorite quotations – even if there is a huge pleasure in that, especially if you admire truly terrible jokes.” Michael Wood writes an essay on James Joyce, Lewis Carroll, and the origins of clever wordplay for the London Review of Books.
●
●
Empty America Series
Director Ross Ching was so inspired by photographer Matt Logue’s “Empty LA” project, he decided to expand the idea. What’s resulted is the ongoing Empty America series, whose first two installments depict Seattle and San Francisco without any humans present. Coming up: Washington D.C. and New York City.
●
●
It’s cool, he senses the danger of genius
John Jeremiah Sullivan spoke to the Guardian about writing, Pulphead, and “finding that island of legitimacy.” And then there’s his recent NYT Magazine piece on Venus and Serena Williams.
●
●
Ken Jennings Debunks Space Myths
Because I Said So! author and Jeopardy all star Ken Jennings is debunking space myths all month over at Woot. In his first installment, he looks at just how much money was spent to develop NASA’s “space pen.”
●
●
Dictionary Panics
Recommended reading: on dictionary-related panics from The New Yorker. Pair with our own Bill Morris‘s Millions essay “Prescriptivists vs. Descriptivists: The Fifth Edition of The American Heritage Dictionary.”
Elena Ferrante Writing for Kids
Elena Ferrante will be publishing a children’s book, The Beach at Night, this December. Revisit our own Jacob Lambert’s series on whether or not picture books are leading our children astray to prepare for the release.
●
●
New Releases
Elizabeth Kostova’s follow-up to The Historian is out today. The Swan Thieves was one of our “Most Anticipated” books. Also out today is Day out of Days, a collection of stories by Sam Shepard, and Game Change, an account of the 2008 presidential race from John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, a pair of big name political reporters.
●
●