On the latest episode of Jordan Kisner‘’s Thresholds Podcast on Lit Hub Radio, Ocean Vuong discusses the ideas surrounding language and creation that went into his most recent book, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. “So much of our culture is bent on fighting David and Goliath, wrestling the muse,” Vuong says. “We look at creation as a battleground. And I think it’s one of the greatest detriments to creativity is to see ourselves as participants in a war when it should be participants in creation.”
Ocean Vuong on Being a Participant in Creation
Algorithmic Forecasting
The Financial Times takes a detailed look at the Financial Computing Centre, home of future quants, where Michael Galas is working to build “a hedge fund without employees” and a crop of PhD candidates are using social media to predict the markets. Could these algorithms one day spill beyond finance, and influence education or social sciences?
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The litigation is never dead. It’s not even past.
Last Thursday, Faulkner Literary Rights, the company controlling William Faulkner’s works, proved two things by suing Sony Pictures Classics: 1) that they finally got around to seeing Midnight In Paris (2011); and 2) that they’re not down with Woody Allen’s decision to include two of the Nobel Prize-winning author’s lines in Owen Wilson’s dialogue.
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Laura Amy Schlitz Interview
Newbery Medalist and Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! author Laura Amy Schlitz was interviewed for Publisher’s Weekly. She discussed her latest novel, Splendors and Glooms, which “allowed [Schlitz] to marry two of her passions in a single work – [Charles] Dickens and marionettes,” as well as her “half-hour, one-page trick” for writing.
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*Cricket*
“It’s a book about fathers that has few good ones on display. It’s a book about language that cannot decide among many. It’s a book about bargains in which no character makes a wise one.” On Aravind Adiga’s new novel Selection Day.
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New Vessel Press Brings International Literature to the US
New Vessel Press is a new publisher specializing in the translation of foreign literature into the English language. Translator Ross Uffberg and journalist Michael Z. Wise started it last year. Next month, they’ll publish their first book, The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra by Pedro Mairal, and they have plans for quite a few more as well.
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The Oldest Joke
This week in book-related graphics: The New Yorker takes a poll and ranks the funniest jokes from the world’s oldest joke book, the Philogelos.