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Category: Books

Published August 15, 2013

Warren Ellis Has Arrived

“I’m a comic book writer. I still don’t think this is going to be run by The Paris Review.”


Warren Ellis, author of Gun Machine and Dead Pig Collector, in conversation with Molly Crabapple for The Paris Review:

I try not to get involved in the business of prediction. It’s a quick way to look like an idiot. There’s an expectation around writers of science fiction, which I sometimes am, that we’re predictors of the future, that that is the business of science fiction. Which we’re not, and never were.

Science fiction is social fiction. That’s the line from Mary Shelley through H. G. Wells and Aldous Huxley and George Orwell to the politically committed writers of the sixties and seventies. It’s about using speculation as a tool with which to examine the contemporary condition. The closest it comes to prediction is in the provision of long-range weather warnings.

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Published August 10, 2013

Toytown: Architecture on the Carpet

The Financial Times architecture correspondent Edwin Heath reviews Architecture on the Carpet: The Curious Tale of Construction Toys and the Genesis of Modern Buildings by Brenda and Robert Vale, which argues that construction toys such as Lego and Meccano not only reflect the architecture of the real world, but influence the way individual architects design:

Construction toys have always been about what adults would like to play with themselves. Or what they feel their children should be playing with. They are worthy. But somehow Lego has managed the difficult feat of appearing playful, of being versatile and not being overly didactic. If English construction toys reflect a residual, Pooterish suburbanism, Lego, whose first plastic bricks appeared in 1947, is liberated Danish pop art modernism, of the same world as Verner Panton’s fiercely colourful plastic chairs and Claes Oldenburg’s confusion of scales. It is the most urban of the toys, encouraging the building of whole cities.

The company recently brought out a series of kits to make modernist icons by Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and, of course, Frank Lloyd Wright. They are clearly aimed at adults, the kind of gift which confers on the giver culture and playfulness. In their specificity (designed for only one possible outcome), they are exactly what Fröbel and Rudolf Steiner were set against, the latter, one of the most influential of play theorists, being convinced that only the vaguest sense of reality should be designed into a toy so that as much room is left for the imagination as possible. These are toys emulating an already built reality.

It’s a fascinating idea, but I wonder if the younger generation of architects are more influenced by video games than toys?

(Financial Times)

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Published August 1, 2013

Books: A Documentary

Last year (as some of you may remember) Larry McMurty, author of The Last Picture Show, sold over 300,000 antiquarian books from his store Booked Up at auction. Now, filmmakers Mathew Provost and Sara Ossana of Studio Seven7 Films have started a Kickstarter campaign to help them complete a documentary about McMurty, the auction, and the antiquarian book trade in the US:

The campaign ends August 18th, and as of today they’re some way off their goal, so consider donating a couple of bucks if you want to see the finished film.

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Published July 30, 2013

Nicolas Roeg: “Well, I’ll Be Damned”

Also at The Telegraph, film director Nicolas Roeg (Performance, Walkabout, Don’t Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth)  talks to John Preston about his new memoir, The World Is Ever Changing:

Roeg insists that he had no idea what sort of films he wanted to make when he became a director. Instead he fell into directing when Donald Cammell, who’d written the original script for Performance, needed someone with visual flair to collaborate with.

Eventually, the film made legends of Roeg and Cammell, but at the time it almost finished them both. At an early screening, one Warner Bros executive was reportedly so appalled by the sight of Mick Jagger and James Fox exchanging sexual partners, clothes and identities that he threw up. On the film’s release, the critic of Life magazine described Performance as “the most completely worthless film I have ever seen since I began reviewing”.

… Now, of course, the wheel has come full circle and, as Roeg notes drily, he’s lost count of the people who claim to have played a critical role in Performance’s success. Is it a film you look back on with fondness and pride? I wonder. “I don’t look back on any film I’ve done with fondness or pride,” he says promptly. “I look back on my films, and on the past generally…” He shakes his head in a bewildered sort of way. “I can only use the phrase, ‘Well, I’m damned’.”

At the Financial Times, Peter Aspden reviews the book with new books about Orson Welles and Roman Polanski:

The greatest auteurs in cinema have traditionally had a habit of gorging on their favourite subjects, their leading ladies, their studios’ cash registers. Today’s directors are less monstrous, and altogether more respectful of the tiresome fact that cinema is a collaborative art form. Put it down to sharper accountants, blander movie stars, infernally complex technological demands. It is more difficult than ever to be a legend in your own lunchtime, and that’s a shame.

Interestingly, Aspden recommends the interactive iPad edition of Roeg’s memoir, which comes “complete with sequences from his films and grandfatherly accounts of their making, which ramble sweetly into occasional dead ends.” Nice.

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Published July 30, 2013

Janet Malcolm: The Devil in the Detail


Gaby Wood interviews journalist Janet Malcolm for The Telegraph:

How Malcolm goes about her journalistic business is clear from her person. Her gaze is remarkably unflinching; unnervous, but not stern. She concentrates on looking at all times. She is difficult to interview, but for reasons much more prosaic than the dramatic ones I had conjured. She simply finds herself uninteresting, and so gives away little. You feel there is much more to know, and that the failure must lie in your ability to ask about it. Because when you listen back to the recording you find that she has not been especially evasive, merely – politely – private. ‘Have a macaroon,’ she says.

Malcolm’s most recent collection of essays, Forty-One False Starts, has just been published in the UK by Granta.  The US edition is available from FSG, (and is, for sake of disclosure etc., distributed in Canada by my employer Raincoast Books).

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Published July 26, 2013

Interaction of Color Reimagined


Just in time for the 50th anniversary of Interaction of Color by Josef Albers, Yale University Press has partnered with the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and Potion Design to create an interactive digital edition of the book for the iPad.

In this video,  Michelle Komie, senior editor of art and architecture at Yale University Press, discusses the project:

While this sampler for the app includes commentary by Knopf art director Peter Mendelsund:


On a recent episode of Design Matters Debbie Millman spoke to Brenda Danilowitz, Chief Curator at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, and Philip Tiongson, a principal at Potion, about Josef Alber’s book and the new digital edition:

And, of course, Interaction of Color is still available as a good old book.

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Published July 24, 2013

Chip Kidd: What the Stories Look Like


Penn State alumnus Chip Kidd discusses his career at length in a recent interview conducted at the university by host Patty Satalia:

Kidd’s novel The Cheese Monkeys is  loosely based on his time at Penn State.

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Published July 24, 2013

Semi-Outsiders

At Vulture, Jonathan Galassi, the current president of Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, reflects on Boris Kachka’s new book Hothouse, a history of the New York publishing house:

FSG came into its own at a moment when postwar America was opening up and out—when “semi-outsiders,” in the words of critic Irving Howe, were “starting to break into the central spaces of American culture.” What made FSG significant, though, was its ability to catch a long series of literary waves. Straus and Giroux and a whole series of talented younger editors made stars out of Southerners (and Catholics) like Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy and Jews like Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and the émigré Isaac Bashevis Singer. There were the poets of the ­Lowell-Bishop-Berryman generation; Susan Sontag, an entire typhoon on her own, who clued Straus in to great, obscure European writers; and the late-sixties Latin American “boom” (Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, Neruda). There were the New Journalists (Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion) and New Yorker epigone John McPhee; the internationalist poets Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, and Joseph Brodsky; and great children’s writers like Maurice Sendak, Madeleine L’Engle, and Roald Dahl. All contributed to what Kachka calls “FSG culture,” which he ­describes as “high-minded and scrappy, aggressive and refined, quintessentially American but thoroughly international.”

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Published July 24, 2013

St Franz of Prague


At the Financial Times, Ian Thomson, author of Primo Levi: A Life, reviews three new books about Franz Kafka:

In 1982, the Italian writer and Nazi concentration camp survivor Primo Levi embarked on a translation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial. At first he was enthusiastic, hoping to improve the German he had learnt so imperfectly at Auschwitz. Instead, Kafka involved him more terribly than he could have imagined. Levi found only bleakness in the hero Josef K, who is arrested and executed for a crime he probably did not commit.

The more Levi became immersed in Kafka, the more he began to see his own life mirrored in that of “St Franz of Prague”, as he called the Czech writer. Born in Prague in 1883 into a German-speaking Jewish family, Kafka lived a life of quite exemplary tedium as an insurance clerk, rarely travelling beyond his home or that of his parents. Levi saw similar constrictions in his own life as an assimilated Jew in bourgeois Turin. Moreover, Kafka’s three sisters had all perished in the Nazi gas chambers – victims of the grotesque bureaucracy foretold by their brother two decades earlier in The Trial. Kafka must have had a seer-like sensibility, Levi thought, to have looked so accurately into the future.

Pictured above: David Zane Mairowitz’s graphic novel adaptation of The Castle illustrated by Jaromír99, published by SelfMadeHero.

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Published July 22, 2013

50 Canadian Book Cover Designs

Lists are always problematic, but CBC Books longlist of Canada’s Most Iconic Book Covers seems strangely underwhelming somehow. Setting aside what counts as ‘Canadian’ (some of the books on the list were not designed by Canadians for example), ‘iconic’ covers are inevitably those that have stuck around and we are most familiar with, not necessarily those that are well designed or particularly interesting to look at. Needless to say, the list says more about our fondness for certain books and authors than about the current state of Canadian book cover design. Perhaps it isn’t really fair to judge the CBC’s contest this way, but it makes the list less interesting than it might otherwise have been (to me, at least).

That said, I am terrible, no good Canadian. 10 years and one Canadian passport later, I still feel like the immigrant I am. It’s not that I feel particularly British any more (if I ever did), it’s more like I haven’t finished unpacking yet (which might literally be true come to think of it)! In nearly five years of blogging I haven’t dedicated a single post to Canadian book design. To remedy to that, below are 50 (FIFTY!) recent book covers designed in Canada. Some of them are well-known, some of them are award-winners, some of them were recommended, some I’ve posted before, and some are just personal favourites. I can’t say they’re ‘iconic’ but they are all great covers. Enjoy. (Pictured above: The Bedside Book of Beasts by Graeme Gibson; design by Scott Richardson; published by Doubleday Canada).

Continue reading50 Canadian Book Cover Designs
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Published July 17, 2013

Trains, Punks, and Photographs


In 2002, 17-year-old Mike Brodie started hopping trains. Over the next five years he took photographs — first using a found Polaroid camera and then an old 35-mm Nikon — documenting his experiences. In the July/August edition of Book Forum, Geoff Dyer reviews A Period of Juvenile Prosperity, a book collecting Brodie’s photographs:

As with Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency—and if ever a book of photographs deserved to be termed a ballad it’s this one—Brodie’s pictures are entirely from within the world depicted. Goldin always had a knack, according to Luc Sante, for finding beautiful colors and light in what was otherwise a complete dump. The light for Brodie and his fellow travelers is a given, filling their lives with lyric and radiant purpose. The land that blossomed once for Dutch sailors’ eyes whizzes and blurs past as they ride the rails; the light fades, and the dark fields of the Republic roll on under the night. But the book is less a record of sights and places seen than one of the people doing the seeing. Photographs by Helen Levitt don’t just show children playing in the street; they convey what it’s like to be a child. Same here. We share the optimism, recklessness, and manifest romance of these outlaws’ take on destiny.

Earlier this year, Brodie, who is now working as mechanic, talked about the book with All Things Considered on NPR:

NPR: All Things Considered: Trains, Punks, Pictures mp3

I’ve not seen any sign of the book in Canada, but apparently it is available from the publisher Twin Palms, and I’m sure there will be US independent bookstores who have it.

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Published July 12, 2013

The Story Coaster by Grant Snider


Another gem for the New York Times Book Review by Grant Snider. Love the Unreliable Narrator.

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