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Make Your Dream City a Reality, and Other News
By
Dan Piepenbring
October 6, 2014
On the Shelf
A seventeenth-century map of Palmanova, Italy, a medieval star fort.
Wyatt Mason profiles Marilynne Robinson
: “Somebody who had read
Lila
asked me, ‘Why do you write about the problem of loneliness?’ I said: ‘It’s not a problem. It’s a condition. It’s a passion of a kind. It’s not a problem. I think that people make it a problem by interpreting it that way.’ ”
How do
outlandish ideas in architecture
become reality? “The cities we live in need not have been as they are. In fact, they aren’t as they are. There’s a strange desperate hope in realizing how much of life is fiction.”
Lyudmila Ulitskaya’s novels—her latest,
The Big Green Tent
, appears in the U.S. next year—challenge the Russian state, taking on subjects that make many readers uncomfortable. “
A book can be an inspiration or a murder weapon
. Ulitskaya is fascinated by these transformations, but even more so by the peculiar trajectories that create fate—the travels of a person, a picture, a book. If there is a strange journey to be traced, she cannot resist the retelling.”
The e-book is an unstable medium: in a given edition, publishers are always swapping out advertisements, modifying content, rescinding access, or upgrading technology.
So how do libraries preserve e-books
? “Everyone knows that if we don’t do something now, we’ll be in big trouble later.”
Manufacturing stardom, then and now: “Trying to create a coherent image
is always going to be the same
, no matter if the star is from the 1930s or 2010s … Beyonce is producing an image using Tumblr and Instagram, which obviously stars in the thirties didn’t have, but she’s still trying to create a very specific understanding of the type of woman that she is. She’s trying to also make it seem like there
isn’t
a publicity campaign and that she’s not doing that, which was also done in the 1930s.”
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