We’d been planning to brush up on our French, Swahili, and Klingon this summer, but a new contender might just grab us away. You can now learn to speak Dothraki – a fictional tongue from George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice series and the hit TV show Game of Thrones – with this $18 software course. Next: High Valyrian?
The Next Language to Try
The Economist and the Poet
The Economist has a nice interview with Farrar, Straus & Giroux publisher Jonathan Galassi. In it, he discusses the role of poetry in modern society, and how it’s still “something people perversely do.”
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DFW on Writing Nonfiction
“I’m not a journalist, and I don’t pretend to be one, and most of the pieces in there were assigned to me by Harper’s, with these sort of maddening instructions of, you know, just go to a certain spot and kind of, you know, turn 350 degrees a few times and tell us what you see.” Tom Scocca posts a five-part transcript of a phone interview he did with David Foster Wallace in February 1998. (Thanks, Nick.)
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Cowboys and Indians?
“Even if they have to fly to Pakistan to do it, our cowboys are always hunting Indians.” Amira Jarmakani on the perpetuation of Wild West stories even though our idea of the frontier has changed.
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A Mixed Media Analysis
Espen Terjesen, a Norwegian graphic artist, teacher, and writer, has put together a striking piece, equal parts graphic novel and academic essay, on Thomas Bernhard.
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Lydia Kiesling in the Tournament of Books
This week, our own Lydia Kiesling took part in The Morning News Tournament of Books, where she adjudicated a showdown between Scott McClanahan’s Hill William and Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being. Who went on to the next round: the trans-Pacific odyssey, or the tale of West Virginia? (You could also read our own Edan Lepucki’s Tournament contribution from last year, or else read our own Nick Moran’s Year in Reading piece on Scott McClanahan.)
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The Destruction of a Ruin
Recommended Reading: Teju Cole meditates on the destruction of the Baalshamin temple in Palmyra, Syria at The New Inquiry. “The destruction of a ruin is like the desecration of a body. It is a vengeance wreaked on the past in order to embitter the future.“
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On Judging
“Gobble a lot of fiction very quickly and you soon find yourself suffering from the literary equivalent of a food intolerance. Oh no, you think, not another novel about X or Y. At these moments, only one thing keeps you going: the faint hope that the book in question might turn out to be the greatest novel ever written about X or Y.” Rachel Cooke writes for The Guardian about reading 80 books in four months and the process of judging the Folio prize.
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