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.
The Fishermen: The Play
The Best of Young Brazil
“Tracing the journey of a mediocre actor and Holocaust survivor ‘touched by some mysterious higher design’ as he forges and impersonates his way through the war and then back to the city of his birth, the story is part Samuel Beckett and part Isaac Bashevis Singer, with a sudden final bolt of O. Henry. It has the flavour of a morality tale, but what’s most fascinating to me is how difficult it is to derive a moral from it, or rather how easy it is to derive more than one and how openly they stand in conflict with each other.” Kevin Brockmeier extols the fiction of Leandro Sarmatz.
Keeping the Pace
“A story works when there’s momentum, life behind the words,” Mary Miller told Matthew Salesses at The Rumpus. She needs that momentum for her new novel, The Last Days of California, about a family driving to California for the rapture. Also, Amy Butcher wrote about her favorite Millerisms at Hobart.
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What Is Experimental Literature?
“I take to heart Percival Everett’s point that all writing begins as experiment. Experiments are hypo/theses; wagers; fermentations or useless admixtures; mud pies and blood pies.” Miranda Mellis talks with HTMLGiant’s Christopher Higgs in the next installment of Higgs’s essential “What Is Experimental Literature?” interview series. It’s worth perusing the the back catalog if you missed the first three, with the fabulous Debra Di Blasi, Danielle Dutton, and Bhanu Kapil.
Sketches of a Life
Recommended Reading: On Lucia Berlin’s final stories, “a series of sketches which traced her life.”
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I Love You
There are an estimated 1,025,109.8 words in the English language. Why, then, do we return to the same three over and over?
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Not So Smart
Ava Kofman writes about Disney’s Smart House becoming a reality (or just making our lives more difficult).