LINKS

1. Curious about where to find native speakers of Esperanto? Wondering what's the most linguistically diverse nation on Earth? Curious how it is that humans added 103 languages over the past 5 years? Time to consult the Ethnologue.

2. "Plascencia spent most of the early summer on tour, trying to figure out how to read aloud from a book which is in part about the reader’s physical interaction with the printed page."

3. "Slavin is news to me, and very good news. Her previous book, The Woman Who Cut Off Her Leg at the Maidstone Club and Other Stories (1999), was favorably received and seems to have acquired something of a cult following, but Carnivore Diet is the book that's really going to get her going. . . . The great Latin American novelists who are glibly pigeon-holed as practicing "magical realism" loathe the term and go out of their way to avoid being tarred by it, yet it's hard to think of a phrase that more succinctly describes Carnivore Diet." You can read Jonathan Yardley's review here.

4. I remember the splash make when The Good Women of China was released a couple years ago. Now the author has a new book. "In "Sky Burial, " Xinran gives a fictionalized account of the incredible -- and true -- 30- year odyssey of one Chinese woman who went in search of her husband, who had supposedly died while serving with the military in Tibet."

5. Oh Pure and Radiant Heart --> one to read. "Millet is one of a select group of novelists who have taken on the bomb, and she is uniquely suited to this dire subject. A writer of high inventiveness, nerve, keen social insight and satiric humor, Millet is the author of four previous original and gutsy books, including "My Happy Life," winner of the PEN-USA Award for Fiction. The bewitchment of her work derives from her fusing of lyrical realism with purposeful zaniness, and her gift for embedding moral and spiritual inquiries within the psyches of quirky characters. In "Oh Pure and Radiant Heart," her most questing and provocative work to date, Millet approaches our troubling nuclear legacy by boldly positing an outlandish premise, and then taking it to dizzying and unforeseeable heights."

6. I'm not much for graphic novels, but this one, Promethea, sounds like a beautiful mess. "There's a lot of ungainly expository dialogue in those two books ("This is the fourth sphere, right? 'Chesed,' there on the arch above the Jupiter symbol. I think it means mercy"). Their ratio of profundity to claptrap varies with the reader's openness to semi-digested Crowley, and occasionally Moore threatens to sprain an eyelid from winking so hard. (Sophie meets Hermes, who tells her that gods, as "abstract essences," can only be perceived through linguistic constructs like "picture-stories." Picture-stories? she asks. "Oh, you know. Hieroglyphics. Vase paintings. Whatever did you think I meant?") Some readers complained at the time these installments first appeared that they felt like Moore was lecturing at them, and that's absolutely true. But complaining about Promethea's transformation from a graphic novel to a graphic textbook is missing the point: The idea of it isn't to tell a story so much as to present a gigantic mass of arcane philosophy as entertainingly and memorably as possible."

Comments

[derikb]

I'm currently rereading Promethea (post to come in the future). While many complain of the lecturing/textbook aspect of it, I think those parts are way more interesting than the early superhero stuff. It's really all about stories, imagination, metaphor, and different kinds of connections. Plus the art and layouts are amazing.

[Scott]

Derik,

The review mentioned the layouts a few times and they did sound pretty cool. It kinda made me think of Pynchon re: the erudition and the messiness of it.

Do you know if you can buy the whole thing in one volume? I'm kinda interested, but it looks like you have to buy 6 books that retail for about $15 each.

[derikb]

With the current set-up its 5 volumes. The fifth is not out just yet (this month I think). Kind of costly. You may want to look into some place like http://milehighcomics.com (I get all my new comics mail order through them, very nice folks, great service) They are almost constantly having sales and you could pick the books up at a distinctly cheaper price. I suggest buying at least the first 2 as a trial. By the second book you get some of the really complex layout/design stories that (for instance) mix tarot cards, human history, and a series of anagrams of Promethea in the form of scrabble tiles.