Literary & Media Indulgences - 11/27/2011

-- Fifty years ago this month, Jane Jacobs published an enormously influential book: The Death and Life of Great American Cities. (See the Random House advertisement for it above.) Grist remembers it as "the book that inspired a revolution." The Toronto Star thinks Jacobs' critics may have had a point. Anthony Flint in The Boston Globe thinks her urban legacy is in "need of renewal." A reader of Flint's piece writes in to correct his portrayal of Jane Jacobs ("...first and foremost his characterization of Jacobs as a housewife"). The Atlantic looks at the -still- unusual phenomenon of a city planner and urban thinker who is a woman.

-- A striking comparison of TIME Magazine covers in the US, Europe, Asia, and the South Pacific. The dissonance of newsy concerns of American audiences "is not an isolated incident."

-- Binyavanga Wainaina challenges the "insularity" of British literature. His ideas on why American literature resonates more with Kenyans than British literature, despite Kenya being a former British colony, are particularly interesting.

-- "The Long Hard Road to Mars." Caleb A. Scharf shares the great story of our attempts to reach and explore Mars -- extending far further back than I realized (1960). The occasion? Our current window of opportunity to launch the Curiousity rover which just might make it to the red planet.

-- Related: This wonderfully engrossing National Geographic illustration of our decades of interest in Mars. And here's my book review of Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars, the first of the trilogy that is one of the best things I've read in some time. (Green Mars and Blue Mars are far overdue for their own reviews.)

-- Sci-fi and fantasy author Anne McCaffrey has died at age 85.

-- All Over Coffee: A beautiful three-part graphic collaboration between Daniel Handler and Paul Madonna.

-- Funny, I was just reading about Soviet Realism in Adam Thirlwell's delightful book, and here I find World Literature Today's special section looking at post-Soviet literature in the two decades since the superpower's collapse.

-- "Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer accuses the ANC of apartheid-style censorship." Also, South Africa's The Daily Maverick connects Gordimer and Nawaal Sadaawi's search for democracy. "Few African women’s voices have been raised higher than Nadine Gordimer and Nawaal Sadaawi."

-- "This past summer I came across a camel that had lost its hump." A New York Times account of the drought in the Horn of Africa, from the vantage of northern Kenya and with particular attention to how international aid and media intersects with a story of famine.

-- "The End of Chinatown."

-- David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow have been tearing it up lately with their longreads in the New York Review of Books on sexual abuse in prisons. Their latest focuses on immigrant detainees in a peculiarly precarious position -- their jailers effectively double as their jury and judge.

-- The public editor of the New York Times writes an important piece on how journalism, and consumers of journalism, confuse sex and rape.

-- On the push to translate more of Arabic literature, contemporary and classic, into the English language.

-- Related: Al-Ahram reviews the English translation of Samuel Shimon's An Iraqi in Paris.

-- Good news from RiverRun Bookstore in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

-- Related: Ann Patchett on bucking the trend and opening her new indie bookstore in Nashville.

-- "Just the Right Book." An indie bookseller experiments with a matchmaker service.

-- "Lovers of prose in these image-dominated times have no greater ally than W.G. Sebald." In the current Critical Flame, Scott Esposito essays on W.G. Sebald and reviews My Two Worlds by Argentine writer Sergio Chejfec (tr. Margaret B. Carson) from Open Letter Books.

-- The LA Times reviews a re-release of Agatha Christie's autobiography.

-- Grace Dane (Gretchen) Mazur has happily been pushing further into her writing about visual art. In ArtsFuse, she explores Wendy Artin's work and "translating marble onto paper." See also the Isak interview with Mazur (my former teacher) on her latest book, Hinges: Meditations on the Portals of the Imagination.

-- The "best of" lists have been pouring in. See, for example, the Globe and Mail 100, The Guardian best-of-the-year, and the New York Times Book Review list of 100 notable books.

-- Which reminds me: stay tuned for the release this week (!!!) of the new, updated, expanded, revised, all-around-awesome edition of "Choose Books: A Gift Guide for People Who Love Stories."

-- Ta-Nehisi Coates chose to pick up George Eliot's Middlemarch recently, and of it, he says: "She really does command the light."

-- A very tiny book made by a 14-year-old Charlotte Bronte has been discovered. "Its 19 pages are crammed with more than 4,000 words — short stories, news, even advertisements — discernible only by magnifying glass."

-- "Beattitudes: On Ann Beattie."

-- Michael Silverblatt has a great line-up of recent interviews on his KCRW Bookworm show: Jeffrey Eugenides (who looks adorable in-studio with his glasses), Joan Didion, and, um, Ann Beattie.

-- Five decades of journalism, as seen through the pages of the Columbia Journalism Review: a graphic timeline.

-- On the #fridayreads controversy, and "what is an ad," in The Washington Post.

-- How not to respond to literary plagiarism charges.

-- Among the great influences on me: Joni Mitchell's Blue album, which The Rumpus revisits.

-- Alan Moore revisits V for Vendetta, in light of how masks inspired by the comic series that began in 1982 (and more recent film) are catching on in the Occupy movement.

Comments

[pjl]

good on gordimer, although i fear that the situation suggests that coetzee was the more incisive, if the less idealistic, of the gret south african novelists.