“I quickly stopped trying to draw in a realistic way and went for an efficient one.” Max de Radiguès is a Belgian cartoonist whose work you should familiarize yourself with.
Disarmingly Like Love
Most Are Made There Already
Having trouble selling your latest book? Consider marketing it to India. According to the latest data from Nielsen BookScan, the Indian book market grew in volume by 45% (and in value by 40%) over the first half of 2011.
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End of an Era
Fifteen years later, Salman Rushdie and John Le Carre have ended their feud.
Who Tells Your Story
“A couple of years ago I attended a British Council discussion about the state of contemporary writing and the creative future in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation. When someone brought up the dearth of memoirs in the Nigerian literary landscape, almost everyone in the room laughed ruefully. Someone joked aloud, ‘We can’t write memoirs. We’d have to wait for parents to die. Not just parents – everyone who knows us, even!’ This concern is not limited to nonfiction.” Bim Adewunmi writes for BuzzFeed on African immigrants’ stories.
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Murakami on the Stage
A surreal theater production of Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, directed by Yukio Ninagawa, premiered at the Lincoln Center Festival in July. Ian Buruma writes for the NYRB about the marriage of tradition and modernity, and Western and Eastern references in the play. As he puts it, “even without traditional references, the production—perhaps more than Murakami’s novel—is still unmistakably Japanese: stylized, poetic, comical, violent, full of spectacular effects, and often exquisitely beautiful to look at. The setting jumps at lightning speed from a bus station, to a library, to a sleazy bar area. Various characters emerge and disappear, like memories or scenes from a dream, in an assortment of moving transparent boxes.”
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“If there’s one thing I know about it’s beer”
The Wall Street Journal sent Geoff Dyer a bottle of El Segundo Brewing Company’s Blue House Citra Pale ale, and asked him to write about it. Because he’s Geoff Dyer, and there isn’t a topic (e.g. aircraft carriers, photography) on Earth that he can’t write about, he of course obliged.
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What’s “Appropriate”
We’ve been following the YA debate quite attentively – I wrote about it just last week – but Sarah Burnes‘s addition to the conversation, a blog post for The Paris Review, is one of the most eloquent I’ve read. In defense of reading YA fiction as a “grown-up” she writes, “The binary between children’s and adult fiction is a false one, based on a limited conception of the self. I have not ceased to be the person I was when I was an adolescent; in fact, to think so seems to me like a kind of dissociation from a crucial aspect of one’s self. And the critic should be concerned with what is good and what is bad, what is art and what is not—not with what’s ‘appropriate.'”
Tuesday New Release Day: Didion, Freud, Obreht
This week’s big book release is Joan Didion’s memoir Blue Nights. Also out is Esther Freud’s Lucky Break and new in paperback, Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife (our review).