Recommended Reading: Eric Farwell sits down with John Darnielle (aka The Mountain Goats) at Bookforum. You could also check out Darnielle’s Year in Reading piece.
“Kind of like gothic mansions”
Passions, Hobbies. Same Thing, Right?
It’s the weekend, and you know what that means. Time to explore your creative passions. That’s right! Find what you want to do and “dive in a full 10 percent and spend the other 90 torturing yourself because you know damn well that it’s far too late to make a drastic career change, and that you’re stuck on this mind-numbing path for the rest of your life.”
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Language, the Savior
At The Guardian, Jhumpa Lahiri recounts the path that led her to write her latest book in Italian, one of the most anticipated books of 2016. As she puts it, “A week after arriving [in Rome], I open my diary to describe our misadventures and I do something strange, unexpected. I write my diary in Italian. I do it almost automatically, spontaneously. I do it because when I take the pen in my hand I no longer hear English in my brain. During this period when everything confuses me, everything unsettles me, I change the language I write in.”
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New Miéville Fiction
There’s new fiction from China Miéville up at Tor. Miéville’s been a Millions darling for quite some time now, as these two pieces from Bill Morris can attest.
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Nolite te bastardes carborundorum
The Royal Winnipeg Ballet is adapting Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale into a ballet.
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A Logical Fit
The Guardian posted a helpful Q & A to shed light on a great mystery: why is Penguin Classics publishing Morrissey’s autobiography?
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Iraqi Speculative Fiction Comes to the US
“It comprises 10 short stories written by Iraqis, all of whom were guided by a simple yet fertile premise: What might Iraq look like a century from now?” The Atlantic review’s Tor’s anthology Iraq + 100 (originally published last year by Comma Press in England), which was released stateside last month—in an attempt to bring visibility to an underrepresented group of writers in America. Read The Millions’ review of the “ambitious short story collection” from March.