“Long before the term ‘graphic novel’ was coined to explain long-form comic strips, the artist Milt Gross was making precursors to the format,” and one of his lost works is finally being republished. The work, Milt Gross’ New York, was written for the World’s Fair in 1939 and “follows the adventures of the sausage-nosed, conniving, yet amiable con man Pop.”
Long Lost Gross
Doodling Lit
We all doodle, but Meg Wolitzer gets inspired by it. When she was writing The Interestings, she frequently drew her way into her characters. “I sometimes drew crude, Harvey- and Archie-inspired images of my characters, in keeping with the spirit of Ethan Figman and Figland,” she wrote in The New Yorker.
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Coates: A Public Intellectual
The New York Times profiles MacArthur Genius and National Book Award winner Ta-Nehisi Coates as one of America’s foremost public intellectuals. His book We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (which we have been anticipating for months) is released this Tuesday.
The Paris Review Interviews Ursula K. Le Guin
One year after The Millions interviewed Ursula K. Le Guin, the author is interviewed by The Paris Review. Causation or correlation: you decide.
Edgar Award Nominations
The Mystery Writers of America has announced the nominees for the 2011 Edgar Allan Poe Awards [pdf]. Nominees include Tana French for Faithful Place and Victoria Bond and T.R. Simon for Zora and Me (featuring Zora Neale Hurston, girl detective).
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Printing Wikipedia
“Half utilitarian data visualization project, half absurdist poetic gesture:” a Brooklyn artist is working to turn all of Wikipedia into a print encyclopedia set numbering some 7,600 volumes. But the best part of the project by far is the titles for those volumes, which include such gems as “Hulk (Aqua Teen Hunger Force) — Humanitarianism in Africa.”
So Much Drool
Sorry for the mess but we’re still drooling over these photos of A Brief History of Seven Killings author Marlon James‘s Minneapolis loft. Slightly less glamorous but (we think) of equal literary importance, these pictures of our own writing spaces.
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A Worthy Prize
The New York Public Library has named five finalists for its inaugural Harriet Tubman prize, which recognizes non-fiction books that explore the topic of slavery. You may also want to revisit our own Edan Lepucki‘s essay from a few years back on slavery in fiction.
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