Welcome news for Miranda July fans: she tweeted this week that she’s finished work on her debut novel, The First Bad Man. The book will publish in January 2015.
New Miranda July Work on the Way
Iowa’s Online Advanced Fiction Seminar
This fall the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program is offering a free, 7-session live online Advanced Fiction Seminar. The course will run from September 16 through October 28, and it will be taught by fiction writer Nate Brown. Best of all? It’s open to anyone with an internet connection. Applications are due September 6th.
Newly Found Old Book
A 4,000-year-old manuscript has been found in Egypt, predating the “Book of the Dead.” Covered with colorful drawings and illustrations, the manuscript depicts divine beings and spells from incantations.
Not a Soirée
At The Guardian, Susanna Rustin interviews the Irish writer Edna O’Brien, whose new anthology of stories, The Love Object, comes out as an e-book this week. Among other things, she compares a writer who works on a book for only one day a week with a parent who leaves a toddler unsupervised: “You can’t find it again.”
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The Tactile Comic Book
A designer from Copenhagen, Philipp Meyer (not the novelist), has created the first comic book for the blind. “Most of the tactile material that is available for blind people is very information dense. It’s always about information and not often about art,” he says.
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Characterizing Sleep
On this date 109 years ago, a cartoonist first paired the letter “Z” to the act of sleeping, beating out other attempts to write out the sound of slumber such as the tenacious “g-r-r-k-k-k-k” and the elegant “z-z-z-c-r-r-k-k-k-k.”
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Bookshelves Ten Feet High
Chances are you’ve bragged about the size of your library. The number of books you own is a point of pride for many readers. But at what point does collecting books — which few people would say is a bad thing– turn into a problem? At what point, in other words, does it become hoarding? Pair with: Rebecca Rego-Barry on hunting for rare books at college library book sales.
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Terry Castle
Behold the polymathic mind of Terry Castle, professor, literary essayist, and collage artist. At Fevered Brain Productions, her art blog, see digitally alter photos and collages like “Warthog Proffering Rootbeer,” “She Polarizes People,” “Collage Dramas”, and “Kind Hearts and Coronets.” And from the LRB archives, check out her controversial quasi-eulogy for Susan Sontag, her reviews (for example, Always the Bridesmaid on Yopie Prins‘ Victorian Sappho), and her essays (Travels With My Mom). The Professor, Castle’s forthcoming book of essays, will be published by HarperCollins in January.
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