“Qualities other than introspection”
From word nerd to language animal
David Mitchell, when questioned about his language and genre experiments, particularly in Cloud Atlas and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, responds: “It’s a bit like asking a duck billed platypus if it should be considered a mammal or a bird.” The Millions also profiled Mitchell, though we never settled either way on the bird/mammal issue.
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Trololololol
“They said banning me from Twitter would finish me off. Just as I predicted, the opposite has happened.” Talking Points Memo reports that Simon & Schuster is moving forward with plans to publish a book by Breitbart News editor and white nationalist Milo Yiannopoulos, whose extended harassment of comedian Leslie Jones finally led to his expulsion from Twitter last year. Critics of the publishing house have called for its boycott, including some of its own authors.
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Vegans and Vegetarians, Take Note
On The Rumpus this week, an interview with a vegan activist, Dr. Neal Barnard, whose appearance at 58 is “an excellent advertisement” for his diet.
It’s Tuesday: New Releases!
New this week for bookfans: Novels by Nicholson Baker and Nadeem Aslam, as well as a foray into young adult lit by Jane Smiley.
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The Chosen Ones
“The second prophecy was even more intense than the first one, and introduced a lot of new rules I didn’t even know existed, but everyone else seemed to kind of already know about them. But you know what? We’re a misfit band of teens who will do anything for each other now, like stand up to that town bully who’s not even scary to us anymore, now that we’ve faced pure evil and lived.” An excerpt of Mallory Ortberg’s best-selling YA novel.
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Miéville on “Hauntology”
In a fabulously strange, illuminating, and spooky essay, China Miéville establishes the literary definition of “hauntology.”
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Book Preservation
Recommended Reading: On the process of bringing old books back to life.
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