May 3, 2013 On the Shelf Anne Brontë Gets a Headstone, and Other News By Sadie Stein Anne Brontë finally gets an accurate headstone. (The original misstated her age.) “For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that?” Claire Messud bristles at the notion that characters should be likable. The Atlantic is launching a line of e-books. HBO gives Olive Kitteridge the miniseries treatment. In other film news, can you distinguish an Atwood novel from a Hollywood thriller?
May 2, 2013 At Work We Are Made of Memories: A Conversation with Mia Couto By Scott Esposito Born in 1955 in Mozambique, to Portuguese immigrants, Mia Couto is widely considered one of the foremost wielders of the Portuguese language. He has written more than twenty books that have been translated into at least as many languages, and those translated into English since 1990 have garnered him a dedicated Anglophone following. Although Couto’s fiction varies widely, he frequently deals with Mozambique’s civil war, which erupted in 1977, two years after he turned twenty and his nation gained its independence from Portugal. His recurrent use in his work of surreal effects has led many critics to liken his fiction to Latin America’s magical realism, a label at which he bristles. The Tuner of Silences, brought into English by Couto’s longtime translator David Brookshaw and published this year by Biblioasis, tells the story of Vítalico, a father who has dragged his children to an abandoned Mozambican nature preserve after the horrifying death of his wife. As Couto explores the nature of Vítalico’s regime and its eventual collapse, he delves into frequent obsessions: the construction of identity and the role that memory and language play in that process. Recently, over e-mail, I discussed Tuner, influences, labels, and the curious provenance of Couto’s first name in our e-mail correspondence. You’ve mentioned the Angolan writer José Luandino Vieira and the Brazilian João Guimarães Rosa as two influences on your understanding of the Portuguese language. What sorts of cultural influences from within Mozambique have you drawn from? I usually refer to Luandino and Guimarães Rosa as those who inspired me most, but the most important influences on my writing come from those I can’t identify, persons that populated my childhood, my hometown in the Indian ocean, the neighborhood where I was born and where I started to dream about other places and other lives. So, ironically, the main source of inspiration of my writing came from the nonwriting world. Oral culture is still dominant in Mozambique, and the ability to convert reality into stories is still very alive here, even in the urban areas. Storytelling is not exclusively a skill of the griots—the common citizen shares this capacity, telling stories not just with words but with their whole body, using dance and songs and poetry as a unique language. Read More
May 2, 2013 Video & Multimedia Hell Is Other Cats By Sadie Stein Henri the Existential Cat waxes philosophical on the price of literary fame.
May 2, 2013 First Person Counter Culture By Amie Barrodale and Clancy Martin “I would have said, You’re getting there. Now that you said, ‘You nailed it,’ we can never go to the Bluebird again.” “I was trying to give him a little encouragement,” Clancy said. “Well, you fucked us.” The first restaurant we liked in Iowa City was the Bluebird. It’s also the only decent cappuccino in town. We’d go every morning, order our fried eggs, and get three cappuccinos each. The waitresses had to make the cappuccinos themselves. We ordered so many that some of them began to dislike us. One in particular, whom we called Lower East Side. But all of them tried to get away before we had a chance to say, Could we get another. All, that is, except for a Swingers-looking guy, slightly pudgy, whom we were convinced was gay until Clancy complimented his signet ring. Read More
May 2, 2013 Humor The Funnies, Part 4 By Tom Gauld From You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack, by Tom Gauld.
May 2, 2013 On the Shelf Unpoetic Day Jobs, and Other News By Sadie Stein Day Jobs of the Poets. Have you seen James Patterson’s personally-funded “book industry bailout” ads? By a hair, print still trumps digital in the UK. “How I overcame snobbery to self-publish an e-book.” One man’s story. Gillian Flynn: “That’s exactly my goal: to make spouses look askance at each other.”