Did the real-life family of Edgar Wiggin Francisco III inspire some of William Faulkner’s writing? Did a group of scholars try to suppress inquiry into the matter?
Faulkner’s Inspiration; Scholar’s Denial
The Master and the Big Screen
Russian movie producer Svetlana Migunova-Dali is working with U.S. producer Grace Loh, who produced Hot Tub Time Machine, to adapt Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita for the big screen. They say they’re working with a feature film budget of up to $100 million, and they want A-list actors to fill out the cast.
Marie Mutsuki Mockett Interprets Bashō with Her Son
Marie Mutsuki Mockett reads Bashō's haikus with her 10-year-old son, who encounters the poet's work for the first time in the midst of home quarantine.
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Graphic Pains
Over at Public Books, Jared Gardner explores the theme of pain and illness at the heart of many graphic narratives. As he explains it, “Illness, mental and physical, is arguably comics’ invisible master theme, deeply woven into their genome and shaping the stories they tell, from the earliest newspaper strips (chronic allergies in Winsor McCay’s Little Sammy Sneeze) through the rise of superhero comics (from Batman’s PTSD in 1939 through the Fantastic Four’s radiation poisoning in 1961).” Pair with Paul Morton’s Millions piece on the history of Marvel Comics.
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Books without Covers
In the New York Times, Mokoto Rich highlights the superfluousness of book covers in the digital age and the marketing challenges that result. cf. “Ether Between the Covers: Gifting Books in a Digital Age.”
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A Quintet of Interviews for Your Delectation
Anya Ulinich, author of Petropolis, talks to World Literature Today: “What else can a person do when she gets home after a ten-hour work day – with a toothache that she can’t afford to fix . . . – but fall on the couch and watch whatever is in front of her face?” . . . Lydia Davis, whose Collected Stories is just out, talks to Sarah Manguso for The Believer: “At the origin of the work there has to be strong feeling, if it’s going to be any good. Of course, that strong feeling can be a delight in language.” . . . The Book Bench unearths a 1978 John Updike interview with a Croation periodical, which finds the Rabbit Angstrom author halfway through his tetralogy. . . . Edwin Frank of NYRB Classics talks to Omnivoracious, and selects his favorite books in the series (via). . . . And James Ellroy submits to interrogation at The Paris Review: “I was always thinking about how I would become a great novelist.”
Views of the Sandworm
Now that classic sci-fi mag Omni has risen from the Hades of publishing, editors are combing its massive archives in search of material to republish. Among that material, it turns out, are drawings of Dune homeworld Arrakis — drawings that happen to be endorsed by none other than Frank Herbert himself.
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