Back in 2011, our founder C. Max Magee pointed to the fan art of Chris Ayers, who was inspired by DFW’s Infinite Jest. Now, Ayers has a new series, drawn from Margaret Atwood’s MaddAdam trilogy, that illustrates the corporate horrors of the trilogy’s fictional dystopia. Pair with Vanessa Blakeslee on Atwood’s In Other Worlds.
No More McNuggets
Brief Encounters
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Filming in the Fourth Dimension
Guillermo del Toro’s next film will bring us to Tralfamadore. He is adapting Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five with Charlie Kaufman writing the script. “I love the idea of the Tralfamadorians to be ‘unstuck in time,’ where everything is happening at the same time. And that’s what I want to do,” del Toro told The Daily Telegraph.
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I will tell you this Rosalina, not as a taunt or a threat but as an evocation of joy.
From Werner Herzog’s letter to Rosalina, the woman he employs to keep his house: “Music is futile and malicious. So please, if you require entertainment while organizing the recycling, refrain from the ‘pop radio’ I was affronted by recently. May I recommend the recitation of some sharp verse. Perhaps by Goethe. Or Schiller. Or Shel Silverstein at a push.”
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Mary Ruefle Reads Her Work
Listen to Mary Ruefle read two of her poems over at The Poetry Foundation: “White Buttons” and “Shalimar.”
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More links: numbers, Quills, Potter’s defeat, Godzilla
Great posts over at Sarah’s blog and at M.J. Rose’s about where books sell the most copies (think Wal Mart) and why Amazon rankings don’t mean much in the way of book sales. (via Tingle Alley)They’ve announced the nominees for the Quills Awards – an attempt to build a book-focused version of the typical, bloated TV awards show. The nominees seem to be stale mix of award-winners and nominees (NBA, Pulitzer, etc.) from the last 18 months and middlebrow bestsellers that aren’t particularily literary, but aren’t outright trash either. Will anybody watch this? I mean, I like books, but yawn.For the last two weeks, Harry Potter #6 has “been the top-seller in every single one of The Book Standard’s 99 local-area charts. But this week, a glimmer of hope appeared for other authors, as The Book Standard charts registered a change – one single change.” How a “conservative talk-radio personality” unseated Harry Potter in the Bristol-Kingsport-Johnson City, Tennessee, area.Godzilla pauses for a moment before his rampage. Click it. It’s funny.
That Was Fast
McCain speechwriter Mark Salter has been outed as the “Anonymous” behind the political novel O just two days after the book hit shelves.