“Ideas are interesting to me, and religions are a place where ideas have been very subtly embodied for thousands of years. All literature started as sacred literature.” Alexandra Alter interviews Salman Rushdie about his brand-new novel, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights.
Sacred Literature
The Tragedy Interviews
One of Tumblr’s most consistently enjoyable accounts belongs to Ben Dewey, comic book artist and proprietor of The Tragedy Series. This past week, Mr. Dewey gave two interviews about his work.
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The Great White Hope
Ever since The Rumpus began reviewing albums, you knew the day would come when they’d review Vanilla Ice. (If you’re wondering, the writer tackled his major label debut.)
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“You are all going to die”
“Freedom is not freedom from connection. Serial killing is freedom from connection. Certain large investment firms have established freedom from connection. But we as people never do, and we’re not supposed to, and we shouldn’t want to. We are individuals, obviously, but we are more than that.” Joss Whedon speaks to Wesleyan’s graduating class.
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The Cat in the Hat
“Ted has another peculiar hobby — that of collecting hats of every description.” Art imitated life for Theodor Geisel, a.k.a. Dr. Seuss, hat collector extraordinaire.
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All in the Family
Anne Enright, who won the Man Booker for her 2007 novel, The Gathering, has a new book out, The Green Road. Like its predecessor, the novel tracks a large Irish family, the Madigans, in a plotline that spans three decades. In the Times, David Leavitt reviews the book.
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The Finnish Word for Author is “Kirjailija”
Jill Timbers, the translator charged with converting J.K. Rowling’s next book into Finnish, will have to complete the 480-page project in just three weeks. She writes about the work over here, and then adds some more information on the Three Percent blog.
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Whoreallyknows?
“There are two extreme views about punctuation … the first is that you don’t actually need it because it’s perfectly possible to write down what you want to say without any punctuation marks or capital letters and people can still read it youdontevenneedspacesbetweenwordsreally. The second view is that punctuation is essential, not only to avoid ambiguity but also because it ‘shows our identity as educated people.’” Here is Adrienne Raphel from The New Yorker with a history of punctuation in the internet age.
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