Saw this in person for the first time at a bookstore last night… Gray318’s cover really is outstanding.
Natives on the Boat — Teju Cole, author of Open City, on his stay in the Roi des Belges in London, and an encounter with V.S. Naipaul:
This boat of which I am temporary captain is named the Roi des Belges. In 1890, Joseph Conrad piloted a steamship down the Congo on a boat with the same name. That journey became his inspiration for “Heart of Darkness,” a puzzling novella with nested narrators who unfolded a shadowed, strangled, brutal tale. He wrote it in the last year of the nineteenth century and published it at the beginning of the twentieth. So, this perch on which I sit above the Thames—the sky is blue now, the hundred-and-eighty-degree view of it full of long stratus clouds—this perch in which the city is exposed to me but I am not to it, is an homage to Conrad’s bitter vision. What might it mean when the native pilots the ship? What happens when the ones on the shore, numerous, unindividuated, are white?
See also: Teju Cole’s diary in the Financial Times and an interview with Cole at 3:AM Magazine. (Thanks Peter)
SciFi Now picks 10 of the best Judge Dredd story arcs.
Wood For Our Coffins — Adam Kirsch on the modern rival of fairy tales for Prospect magazine:
fairy tales have a double relationship to poverty. They are poor themselves—in motivation, imagery, description, ambiguity, complexity, everything that makes for literary interest—and they are the products of poverty. This is clear enough from their social and economic premises: they are frequently tales of hunger and neglect and child abuse. What we remember about Hansel and Gretel is the gingerbread house and the witch in the oven, but it starts out as a portrait of starvation and infanticide: “If we don’t get rid of them, all four of us will starve,” the children’s mother says to their father. “You may as well start planing the wood for our coffins.”
And finally…
Imprint reviews The Lustigs: A Cover Story, 1933-1961, an exhibition of covers designed and illustrated by Alvin and Elaine Lustig opening at the CVA in Saint Paul, Minnesota, next week.
You can see more of the Lustig’s astonishing body of work at the Alvin and Elaine Lustig Flickr Pool