In 1980, Julio Cortázar gave a series of lectures at Berkeley, which you can now read in the slim, simply-titled volume Literature Class. Among the highlights? This sentence: “I had lived with a complete feeling of familiarity with the fantastic because it seemed as acceptable to me, as possible and as real, as the fact of eating soup at eight o’clock in the evening.”
Fantastisch
Four David Mitchell books on the way
David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks now has an official release date, as well as ample pre-publication details to whet your appetite. News of the book, which will be available in September, also came with the announcement of a new three-book deal with Random House.
No Multiverse For Old Men
Recommended Reading: This dizzying essay from Seb Sutcliffe at 3:AM Magazine on quantum theory in the world of the Coen Brothers. Here’s a complementary essay from The Millions on DVD commentary and paratext novels.
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Wednesday Links
We’ve heard about the weak dollar making things tough on Canadian readers, but the pain is being felt by Canadian publishers as well, as profit margins diminish. The latest casualty is publisher Raincoast Books.Philip Agee died today. His Inside the Company in 1973 may have created a modern day genre, one that would be contributed to by many former agents, the CIA tell-all.The Atlantic reaches deep into the archives to bring us “The History of Children’s Books,” from 1888:It is hard to imagine a world without books for children. There have been children’s stories and folk-tales ever since man first learned to speak. “Many of them,” in Thackeray’s words, “have been narrated, almost in their present shape, for thousands of years since, to little copper-colored Sanscrit children. The very same tale has been heard by the Northmen Vikings, as they lay on their shields on deck; and by the Arabs, couched under the stars in the Syrian plains, when the flocks were gathered in, and the mares were picketed by the tents.” Children’s books, however, are a late growth of literature. Miss Yonge says, “Up to the Georgian era there were no books at all for children or the poor, excepting the class-books containing old ballads, such as Chevy Chase, and short tales, such as The King and the Cobbler, Whittington and his Cat.” We shall nevertheless see that there were English books for children (and it is with no others that we have to deal) long before this time.
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2010 Best Translated Longlist
Three Percent has unveiled the longlist for its 2010 Best Translated Book Award. Roberto Bolaño, J. M. G. Le Clézio, and Orhan Pamuk all made the cut.
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Marcel Proust Paid for Positive Book Reviews
“The French writer Marcel Proust paid for glowing reviews of the first volume of his Remembrance of Things Past to be put into newspapers.” Letters by Proust, which will be auctioned off at Soethby’s in Paris next month, reveal he was willing to pay handsomely for flattering references to his novel. See also: the first entry of The Millions’ Hannah Gersen‘s column, The Proust Book Club.
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Mirror Man
The “mirror man” makes a showing at LA’s Griffith Observatory.