The New York Times asked graphic artists if “the power of storytelling could be communicated in one panel,” and they responded in comics, of course. For more comics, read Paul Morton’s essay on the 25th anniversary of Drawn and Quarterly.
The Graphics of Storytelling
Top 3 Reasons Why You Need to Read Mark O’Connell’s Latest
1. The listicle is “the house style of a distracted culture.”
2. Our own Mark O’Connell writes about the ubiquitous form for The New Yorker.
3. And fittingly, he writes about it in a list.
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So Happy For You
Is envy really the worst form of pettiness, as Kierkegaard suggested? Maybe. The great Roman philosopher Cicero had his own, fairly radical thoughts on envy — namely, that “compassion and envy are consistent in the same man; for whoever is uneasy at any one’s adversity is also uneasy at another’s prosperity.”
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The Fishermen: The Play
A Nottingham-based theatre company will adapt Millions staffer Chigozie Obioma’s Man Booker-shortlisted novel The Fishermen for the stage. The production is scheduled for next year.
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My Roommate
As literary apprenticeships go, it’s hard to beat a chance to live with Doris Lessing. In 1963, not long after the death of Sylvia Plath, Jenny Diski moved in with the future Nobel laureate, who lived just north of King’s Cross in London at the time. In the LRB, Diski recounts her friendship with the novelist.
“But poetry means making”
“We all use a ‘persona’ or mask, to some degree, all the time,” writes poet Robert Pinsky as he challenges the notion—widely held in English classes throughout the world—that a poem’s “speaker” is necessarily separate from a poem’s author. The latest release from Pinsky, the former Poet Laureate of the United States, is Selected Poems, and you can hear him read some excerpts in this video.
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(Don’t) Judge a Book by Its Cover
Dan Piepenbring writes at The Paris Review on judging a book by its cover in the Weimar Republic and the sheer mastery of some of the early twentieth-century German cover designers. Two related pieces from The Millions: our own Bill Morris on the pleasures of the typewritten book cover and Matt Allard on reimagining some popular cover art.
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