A Brief History of Seven Killings author Marlon James was struck by the whiteness of The Hobbit, and in an interview for Entertainment Weekly, he explains it inspired him to write his own fantasy series based on African epic traditions. “It’s sort of like my being a scholar of African history and mythology, and my being a total sci-fi/fantasy geek who rereads things like The Mists of Avalon, they just sort of came together,” James said. He’s targeting a Fall 2018 release for the first book.
Marlon James’s Dark Star Trilogy
Desconocido
Why do Americans read so few translated works? A lot of reasons come to mind, but one is that translated books are often the purview of small publishers, who don’t have the same marketing budgets as the larger companies in the industry. At The New Yorker’s Currency blog, Vauhini Vara looks at the statistics compiled by Three Percent, a database at the University of Rochester that tracks publications of translated works in the country. Related: Oliver Farry’s interview with the Portuguese writer António Lobo Antunes.
The Persistence of Memory
“How can we trust ourselves? Trust that our skills will return? Trust that this blank document—this one, right now—won’t be our undoing? The previous essay I wrote won’t save me when the blank document stares, and the deadline looms, and the editor lurks, and the readers wait.” Mensah Demary on writing and forgetting.
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Notes from Eula Biss
“I’m not convinced that the questions that have been raised for me by the writing I love the most could be answered by the authors themselves.” A new interview with Eula Biss, author of Notes from No Man’s Land, is up on NEA’s Art Works Blog.
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Digital Textbook Rentals
Amazon is going to start allowing Kindle users to “rent” textbooks. The best part? You can keep your notes after the book is returned.
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Speculation
“The only kind of drama is human drama. What matters is how deep you dig.” At the Ploughshares blog, a case for science fiction over “dysfunctional family dramas.”
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Rilke, Nietzsche, and More in ’90s Movies
For LitHub, Emily Temple compiled 50 literary cameos in '90s movies, ranging from Cher and Peyton Place to Lauryn Hill and Rilke, with plenty of Shakespeare throughout.
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