- No Fear for the Future has collected movie moments in which authors show up for no reason. (via Bookslut)
- Joshua Ferris hunts classic fiction for office situations.
- William Gass has won the Truman Capote Award for A Temple of Texts.
- Raymond Carver’s screenwriting career. (via Maud)
- It’s apparently TV Turnoff Week. I’d like to propose Ignoring Your Appliance Because Everybody Else is Doing It Week.
- More bad news for book coverage at the Chicago Tribune.
- James Franco has turned to writing. His first novel has the working title Who’s Your Daddy, Dafoe?
- China Miéville profile. (via Jenny D)
- Books I Wouldn’t Want to Publish.
- The L.A. Times and the Chicago Tribune have slashed 250 jobs. Christ.
- In similar cost-cutting news, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel will no longer be delivering papers to delivery boxes. This is the first phase of the “Go to the Store and Get Your Own Damn Paper, You Lazy Bastard!” program that some newspapers plan to roll out in 2007.
- I had no idea that there were Dark Shadows audio adventures.
Pequeño Roundup
– April 24, 2007Posted in: Roundup
Magic Hours by Tom Bissell: This marvelous collection of essays chronicles everything from film shoots to novelists rescued from oblivion. (The essay on the Underground Literary Alliance, with its portrait of raucous factions, unexpectedly reveals how soft today's literary world has become.) But if you peer between the cracks of these smart pieces, you may very well see how cultural lives are formed from the most unexpected life choices. And as we follow Bissell's development as a writer over the years, that goes for Bissell as well. (
Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway: Harkaway's latest novel greatly improves on his previous book, The Gone-Away World, which I'm already on record as praising. Angelmaker adopts genre elements without ever feeling like a genre book, and it leads me to believe that Harkaway is well on his way to a narrative grace close to China Miéville's. Yet inexplicably this very fun book, which includes an eightysomething badass named Edie Banister, a mysterious mechanical object that may destroy the world, farcical scenarios involving lawyers and the police, and some unexpectedly moving moments about fatherhood, doesn't appear to be getting much attention in American newspapers. Nothing from the snobs at The New York Times Book Review, nothing from The Washington Post. And since I can't get Harkaway on Bat Segundo, I hope this Jump Up and Down mention gets you hopping as well.
The Age of Insight by Eric Kandel: Unless you're really pressed for time, forget Jonah Lehrer. If you want to understand creativity and its relationship to neuroscience, then the bowtie-wearing Nobel laureate is your man. In addition to being a physically beautiful book (you will drool over many of the paintings), there are helpful overviews on optical illusions, science, biographical backgrounds, and many vital figures from the Vienna Secession. Kandel's enthusiasm (and his call for greater unity between the humanities and science) is contagious.
It seems that part of the “No fear for the future” post by Chris Nakashima-Brown is based on his 2004 story Prisoners of Uqbaristan, which is a piece of Borgesian fiction featuring Borges as a guest star on the Love Boat. It’s a story that Borges himself would have loved.