Another back to school appropriate comic, this time by J.A.K. (AKA Jason Adam Katzenstein) for The New Yorker:
Published September 5, 2017
Tag: new yorker
Published February 8, 2017
Fade to Black
Hilton Als on James Baldwin, movies, and Raoul Peck’s documentary I Am Not Your Negro, for The New Yorker:
Comments closedOne has the sense, in the sections of “I Am Not Your Negro” that are devoted to Baldwin’s relationship to film, that Peck is stepping in to make the film that Baldwin couldn’t make. From the beginning of his career, Baldwin longed to make movies. In the introduction to his 1955 landmark collection, “Notes of a Native Son,” he wrote, “About my interests: I don’t know if I have any, unless the morbid desire to own a sixteen-millimeter camera and make experimental movies can be so classified.” To my knowledge, Baldwin never satisfied that desire (morbid, perhaps, because he knew of the herculean effort that goes into getting any movie made), but he never stopped yearning to be a filmmaker. Like a number of other significant twentieth-century authors—James Agee, Truman Capote, Susan Sontag, and his friend Norman Mailer—he knew that the page was not enough in the modern world; cinema was a powerful medium with many more “readers.” What would his life as an artist have been like, and what would American cinema be like now, had it opened itself up to him?
Published June 20, 2016
Punctuation
Grant Snider has drawn a lovely series of cartoons on punctuation for The New Yorker.
Published May 25, 2016
Fable
Not an actual book cover, but a new Tom Gauld illustration for a Charles Yu (Sorry Please Thank You) short story in The New Yorker.
Tom has also just joined Instagram if that’s your thing.
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Published March 17, 2016
The Custodian of Forgotten Books
In a lovely piece for The New Yorker, Daniel A. Gross talks to blogger Brad Bigelow, the man behind the Neglected Books, about rediscovering forgotten literature:
Comments closedMost novels are forgotten. Glance at the names of writers who were famous in the nineteenth century, or who won the Nobel Prize at the beginning of the twentieth, or who were on best-seller lists just a few decades ago, and chances are that most of them won’t even ring a bell. When “The Moonflower Vine” resurfaced and ricocheted around the publishing world, it became an unlikely exception.
What’s strange about the journey of that book—and about our moment in the history of publishing—is that its rediscovery was made possible by an independent blogger, named Brad Bigelow. Bigelow, fifty-eight, is not a professional publisher, author, or critic. He’s a self-appointed custodian of obscurity. For much of his career, he worked as an I.T. adviser for the United States Air Force. At his home, in Brussels, Belgium, he spends nights and weekends scouring old books and magazines for writers worthy of resurrection.
“It can just be a series of almost random things that can make the difference between something being remembered or something being forgotten,” Bigelow told me recently. On his blog, Neglected Books, he has written posts about roughly seven hundred books—impressive numbers for a hobbyist, though they’re modest next to the thousands of books we forget each year. “It’s one little step against entropy,” he said. “Against the breakdown of everything into chaos.”
Published March 5, 2016
Cold Comfort Books
Published February 25, 2016
“Awesome” is the New “Massive”
The New Yorker‘s ‘Comma Queen’ Mary Norris considers (mis)use of the words “massive” and “awesome”:
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Published December 10, 2015
Update
Pretty much.
YA covers for 2015 coming soon.
(Cartoon by Bruce Eric Kaplan for The New Yorker)
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Published November 11, 2015
Christoph Niemann’s Coffee Break
Published October 31, 2015
George Saunders Writing Education
The New Yorker has a lovely essay by George Saunders, excerpted from a new book called A Manner of Being: Writers on Their Mentors, on his education as a writer:
Comments closedFor me, a light goes on: we are supposed to be—are required to be—interesting. We’re not only allowed to think about audience, we’d better. What we’re doing in writing is not all that different from what we’ve been doing all our lives, i.e., using our personalities as a way of coping with life. Writing is about charm, about finding and accessing and honing ones’ particular charms. To say that “a light goes on” is not quite right—it’s more like: a fixture gets installed. Only many years later… will the light go on.
Published October 28, 2015
Liniers in New York
The New York Times profiles Argentinian cartoonist Ricardo Siri, better known as Liniers:
“When I started the comic everything was horrible,” Liniers, 41, said in a recent interview at his publisher’s office in SoHo at the start of an East Coast book tour. “The towers fell here,” he said, “and in Argentina there was a huge economic tailspin and we had five presidents in a week. So I wanted to create something optimistic as an act of resistance, like a positive revolution.”
In “Macanudo,” plotlines usually do not extend past the punch line, if one exists at all, and the characters and type of humor can change daily. Penguins, gnomes and an olive named Oliverio are only a handful of the creatures that float in and out of “Macanudo.”
“I like to surprise,” Liniers said. “When readers open up the paper, I don’t want them to know what to expect.”
Liniers has two new books out this fall — Macanudo #3, a collection of his newspaper strips published by Enchanted Lion, and Written and Drawn by Henrietta, an original kid’s book published by TOON.
