Watching your book be adapted into a film can be a challenge for an author. At Vulture, John Green discusses his involvement in The Fault in Our Stars adaptation, which he has nothing but positive things to say about. “It was a joke on the movie that I cried every day. But I cried every day because they were good every day!” The film’s full trailer was released this week, and in case you still haven’t read the novel, here’s our review.
Crying with John Green
Typesetting in the Digital Age
From Abu Dhabi’s The National, an interesting piece on the challenges of typesetting and book design on digital platforms: “With the coming of ebooks, this invisible craft must be reinvented if it is not to disappear.”
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Tom Wolfe on “The Human Beast” and its Kingdom of Speech
Tom Wolfe’s next book will be a “nonfiction account of the animal/human speech divide,” reports Sarah Weinman. Presumably this effort – entitled The Kingdom of Speech – will be based on the author’s “Human Beast” lecture from 2006. (A lecture he went on to explicate in a 2008 interview with SF Gate.) Hopefully the Great White Suit’s return to straight nonfiction will prove more successful than his attempt at fictionalizing Miami last year.
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Ferrante Furor
In case you missed it, this past weekend The New York Review of Books likely outed the author who’s been writing under the nom de plume of Elena Ferrante. Condemnation was fast and furious, including pieces by n+1 and this fantastic Twitter thread by critic Lili Loofbourow. We join the chorus of voices who would rather direct the attention back to Ferrante’s work. Might we suggest starting with this piece about The Neapolitan Quartet‘s subversive power?
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Wizard Jail
Recommended Reading: Hannah Rose-Woods on totalitarianism in the wizarding world.
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The Pathos of Reno
“My friend Kathy was a Mustang Ranch girl in the eighties, had a line on how to bring cocaine into town, and was party girl central and making a lot of money. She was in the center of it in a way that my characters can see but they can’t ever get to. Reno is a beautiful, beat up, and weird town devoted to this false notion of luck. It’s a beautiful place.” Talking with Christian Kiefer.
Night Watch
Recommended Reading: Thomas Dylan Eaton on the Austrian writer Peter Handke.
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Viet Thanh Nguyen’s on Exploring Parallel Lives Through Writing
Viet Thanh Nguyen discusses his newest book, The Committed, and how it allows him to explore paths in life he may have missed.
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