Moby-Dick is a quintessential Great American Novel, perhaps even the greatest, but it might not be pure fiction. That’s what George Dobbs argues in a piece on “The Real Life Inspirations Behind Moby-Dick” for The Airship. Invention or not, at least we can be thankful no cannibalism sneaked its way onto the Pequod…
A real life Moby-Dick
Sofia Coppola’s Little Mermaid
Sofia Coppola will direct a live adaptation of “The Little Mermaid.” No, not the Disney version, but the Hans Christian Andersen one. Expect something darker than singing crabs.
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Jane Austen in New York
At the Morgan Library in NYC: “A Woman’s Wit: Jane Austen‘s Life and Legacy.” Read the NY Times review of the show here. And, if your hankering for eighteenth and early nineteenth century English art isn’t sated by the Austen, the Morgan is also offering “William Blake‘s World: ‘A New Heaven Is Begun'”.
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Heavy Feather Review’s Call for Submissions
As they begin preparation work on “Vacancies,” a special double-issue of their magazine, the folks at Heavy Feather Review have issued a call for writing that explores “the dimly lit corners of the unoccupied, unassuming, or idle.” For inspiration, look toward Philip Levine’s poem, “An Abandoned Factory, Detroit.”
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Bright Young Thing
Who is Samantha Shannon, and why should you care about her? Well, for starters, she’s twenty-one years old, her debut novel The Bone Season is coming out next week, and her publisher suspects she may be the next J.K. Rowling.
Catlin Seaview Survey
One of my favorite Google Easter Eggs was the (now removed) instruction to “swim across the Atlantic Ocean” in order to get from New York to London. Today, however, that joke seems prophetic. Google, in conjunction with The University of Queensland and the Catlin Group, has created the Catlin Seaview Survey or, in other words, “an underwater variant of the Google Street View service.”
Approaching Parity
“If we are looking for a single category to explain why women are better represented among best-selling authors today, the Literary/None category is our best candidate. Most best-selling books fall into this category, and its change over time closely matches the overall gender ratio, shifting from extreme bias in the 1980s to close to parity in the 2000s.” Rosie Cima has put together a beautifully thorough and thoughtful analysis of gender, best-seller lists, and publishing for The Pudding. For a more exegetical analysis, consider our own Sonya Chung‘s exploration of writing across gender lines.
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Postscript
Just before he died earlier this year, Nobel winner Günter Grass completed his last manuscript, Vonne Endlichkait, “a literary experiment” that combines prose, poetry, and illustration. The book has just been published in German and will be available in English next year.
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