We didn’t catch it in time for our big preview, but Kazuo Ishiguro’s forthcoming novel The Buried Giant, now has an official U.S. release date of March 2015. The novel is the author’s first in 10 years, and his British publisher says it will be about “lost memories, love, revenge and war.”
New Ishiguro: The Buried Giant
Another View
“But we are lured into believing that the first person is the manifestation of an authentic self. Or: we fall for the first person because we feel so little coherence in our own internal lives, and immersing ourselves in a sustained first person narrative gives us the false reassurance of an illusion.”
●
●
The AOL Layoff Carnage
At The Awl, a former AOL freelancer reports on the layoff carnage there in the wake of the HuffPo acquisition.
Deep In Yakuza Territory
Photographer Christopher Jue journeyed with People Who Eat Darkness author Richard Lloyd Parry into the four-story headquarters of the Kudō-kai, a Yakuza group headquartered on the Kyushu island of Japan. “My mental note to myself,” says Jue, “was ‘once I step foot into their property, anything can happen.’”
●
●
Teju Cole’s Photography
Amitava Kumar writes complementary text for Open City author Teju Cole’s photography exhibit. You can check out Cole’s Flickr page over here.
The London “Book Map” Has It All
The good folks at Dorothy labored over a tremendous “Book Map” depicting the settings of some 600 literary works based in London. The books, poems, and essays selected for the map run the gamut from T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” to J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series.
If You Like TED Talks
On the Media‘s Bob Garfield hosts “The Genius Dialogues,” a new interview podcast featuring recipients of the MacArthur Foundation’s so-called genius grants. First-season guests include Radiolab creator Jad Abumrad; Luis von Ahn, founder of the language learning app DuoLingo; microbiologist Manu Prakash; choreographer Elizabeth Streb; and writer and producer David Simon. We’ve hosted a few geniuses here as well, including Ben Lerner, Yiyun Li, and Karen Russell.
●
●
The Future of the University Library
The landscape of university library use is changing, along with the attendant ways in which academics and college students alike do research.
●
●
●
Eleanor & Park on Screen
Our favorite teenage misfit couple is coming to the big screen. Dreamworks will adapt Eleanor & Park with Rainbow Rowell writing the script. Filming doesn’t begin until 2015, so you have plenty of time to read the book. Here’s our own Janet Potter’s review.