At Electric Literature, Agustina Bazterrica discusses her novel, Tender Is the Flesh, with Elizabeth Sulis Kim, and reflects on fiction’s ability to raise questions and open minds. “I love literature that makes an impact and generates a response, but does not tell me what to do,” Bazterrica says. “In my own writing I want to generate questions. And a lot of people told me that after reading my book they stopped eating meat. I don’t know how much that decision endured. I don’t care if they stop eating meat for one day, one week or several years, it’s not the important thing. The important thing is that they start looking at reality in a different way.”
Agustina Bazterrica on Cannibalism and Dystopian Fiction
Adventures in Journalism
Bono and Bob Geldof guest edited Monday’s issue of the Globe and Mail newspaper in Toronto.
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Place to Place
“Now the lattice that connects us is digitally immediate we travel all the more, but we’ve lost this thrill of adventure. It’s oddly touching to read a novel where journeys are so inherently exciting, and it makes the book both consummately funny and poignantly elegiac.” On the novel Changing Places by David Lodge.
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More of the Little Prince
Unpublished pages from Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince have been unearthed, and they contain clues to a political reading of the children’s classic.
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If Shakespeare Was a Programmer
“While it’s easy to dismiss coding as rote exercise—a matter of following rules—it’s worth remembering that natural language is subject to rules of its own: grammar, syntax, spelling. The best writers test these rules, bend them, or break them outright, and in doing so they keep the language alive…. With that in mind, I wanted to apply the quirks and transgressions of the great authors to JavaScript, to see where that pushed the language.” Angus Croll imagines Shakespeare as a programmer in a piece for Quartz and in his book, If Hemingway Wrote JavaScript.
Tuesday New Release Day
A week after it wins the Booker, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is now on American shelves. Jonathan Lethem’s newest Chronic City comes out today. Dave Eggers’ novelization of a movie based on a children’s book, Wild Things is out in standard and special fur-covered editions. A Lydia Davis-translated French “masterpiece” is out today from NYRB Classics.
iStephen Fry
Stephen Fry joins “the congregation at the Church of Apple” for the launch of the iPad and shares his thoughts on the company and its newest product.
There Goes Ten Minutes of Your Weekend
The visual wizards of Pop Chart Lab have put together yet another mind-bogglingly thorough visual taxonomy. This time, instead of cocktails or monsters, the graphic artists have turned their attention toward “The Magnificent Map of Rap Names.”
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