Here’s a wonderful way to spend 77 minutes: the NYPL posted the entire video of a conversation between Adrian Nicole LeBlanc and Behind the Beautiful Forevers author Katherine Boo.
“It’s the people that keep you going back”
John Lewis’s March
Comics specialist Dominic Umile checks out March: Book One, the first installment in a nonfiction graphic novel trilogy and biography of civil rights activist and current Georgia Congressman John Lewis.
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A Response to the Death of Writing
“Why, after all, do writers write? What is the impulse, the insistence on story, on seeing and representing the world? It has little to do with technology although everything to do with narrative, which is a purpose that, on the surface, technology also seems to share. The difference is that the writer creates narrative with intention, whereas technology merely gathers, or processes, information, leaving interpretation, analysis, up to us.” Let’s just say David L. Ulin doesn’t think Joyce would work for Google.
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Calvino’s Other Invisible Cities
William Weaver, Italo Calvino’s longtime translator, writes about the pair’s “complex relationship,” their “consuming passion for words,” and the Cosmicomics author’s travels through “his invisible cities, cities of ideas, or perhaps ideas masquerading as cities.”
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Marketing Murakami
To encourage first edition sales of Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, his publishers are going to include “a special sheet of stickers designed by five Japanese illustrators.” If that sounds as corny to you as it does to me, then consider the fact that the book likely does not need any real marketing strategy whatsoever: when it came out in Japan, it sold over a million copies per week.