This summer, Emily Books will launch a new imprint with Coffee House Press, featuring books “by women and gay men and gender outsiders—or people who had transgressive, interesting, weird personalities.” Also check out this Millions essay on what we call what women write.
Transgressive, Interesting, Weird
“Young at Heart”
A new YA series spun off from The X-Files explores Fox Mulder's teen years, and you can read the first chapter here. You may also be forgiven for feeling like the entire premise is a bit fraught. Not only is the mental image of Spooky Mulder with acne a tad jarring, but on a more existential level, as Zan Romanoff has written for our site, "there is no such thing as the young adult novel."
On The Road With DFW
At the LA Times, Scott Esposito gives David Lipsky's Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace a mixed review.
A Few Chapters Short of a Novel
Do people enjoy writers like Pynchon and Nabokov in part because they're so odd? A new paper suggests that we tend to like art when we believe its creator is eccentric. The Atlantic reads through a study that’s a bit of a strange one.
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“I’ll Read Anything”
"If the sentences are meticulously made, I’ll read anything, whether it’s as destabilizing as a Gary Lutz short story or as melancholy as a Chris Ware comic. The only books I give up on are texts where the writer’s attention is concentrated so heavily on narrative questions that his or her use of language becomes careless." Anthony Doerr, whose All The Light We Cannot See won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, discusses genre, Calvin and Hobbes, and the 2,080 books he still wants to read as part of the New York Times Book Review's By the Book series.
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Ray Harryhausen Dies at 92
Visual effects virtuoso Ray Harryhausen died this week at the age of 92. Harryhausen was first inspired to take up movie-making when he watched King Kong with his childhood friend Ray Bradbury, and his pioneering career spanned over forty years. Over at Vulture, you can check out a couple of his most well-known scenes. To my mind, though, his best work will always remain Galgo’s creepy, stretch-tastic wizard hand from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.
Possible Release of Mitch Hedberg’s Notebooks
Lynn Shawcroft is comedian Mitch Hedberg’s widow, and she curates MitchHedberg.net. In a series of tweets this week, Shawcroft alluded to the possibility that she’ll be releasing Hedberg’s notebooks in the near future, perhaps as part of a book. Of course some excerpts from Hedberg’s notebooks are already available online, such as this fantastic sketch which explains the trouble with mingling before a comedy set.
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The True Face of the Earth
As Le Petit Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said, "The aeroplane has unveiled for us the true face of the earth." Perhaps that can be extrapolated for satellites, too. Either way, if this incredible, orbital HD Vimeo footage doesn't move you, then I don't know what could.
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Beautiful and Pointless?
Does poetry still matter? At NPR, Tracy K. Smith says yes.
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