If you like comic books, diverse characters and / or our recent article on Gene Luen Yang, pay close attention to the internet on Monday afternoon. Yang will be part of a Google Hangout on the 4th to talk about his book Boxers & Saints with a reporter TIME for Kids and BookUp, two outlets for young readers, and the chat can be streamed live beginning at 2pm EST.
Google Hangout with Gene Luen Yang
Mind the Label
“By casting my book as personal rather than professional—by marketing me as a woman on a journey of self-discovery, rather than a reporter on a groundbreaking assignment—I was effectively being stripped of my expertise on the subject I knew best.” Suki Kim on writing a work of investigative journalism that was miscategorized as memoir. Pair with this Millions piece in defense of memoirs.
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You May Finally Touch the Art
Greek artist Petros Vrellis has created a touch-sensitive, interactive version of Van Gogh’s Starry Night.
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Hatchet Job
Cutting out large chunks of a book is pretty common, but cutting out 200 pages is a little unusual. While working on his latest novel, Joshua Ferris decided to abandon the elements drawn from crime fiction, which meant he had to toss out a huge portion of his draft. “Now that was a fun day,” he says.
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False Positive
At The New Yorker, Sarah Miller humorously learns why only positive book reviews might be a bad thing. “If St. Petersburg is the Little Engine That Could of city names, then the main character, Raskolnikov, is the Little Engine That Could of elderly pawnbroker murderers,” she writes in her review of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
The Young Library
One downside to being an internationally acclaimed author is that people care an awful lot about digging into your past. Haruki Murakami has found this out the hard way, as a librarian from Kobe High School (which Murakami attended during his younger years) has made public a list of books checked out by then-budding author. For more “Murakami meets library,” here’s a review of his own The Strange Library.
Paradox of Choice
Despite the “grotesquerie of courtship rituals” they present, Roxane Gay enjoys watching The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, in part because, as she explains, they hearken back to America’s Puritan origins. In The New York Times, the essayist, novelist and Year in Reading alum reflects on a guilty pleasure.
Castellanos Moya on the Bolaño Bubble, Part Two
Horacio Castellanos Moya, the author of Senselessness [review], again tackles the commodification of Roberto Bolaño, this time in a lengthy piece in Guernica. “It’s the landlords of the market,” he writes, “who decide the mambo that you dance.”
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