bpi1700

I'll be taking a couple of days off to play with my kid so the posts might be a bit lean for the next little bit. To while away the hours until I post again, take a look at the bpi1700 site. It's an archive of British Printed Images to 1700.

Pictured above: A New yeares guift for shrews, a sheet engraved c.1630 and signed by the relatively unknown Thomas Cecill.

Meet Today's Newest Literary Stars!

Dead people.

Writing is a Weapon

Since winning the Booker prize in 1997, Arundhati Roy has put fiction on hold to become a global dissenter against repression, economic 'progress' - and dams. Tim Adams discovers the roots of her political passion in a story in The Guardian.

From said story...

Arundhati Roy has two voices. The first, dramatically personal and playful, was the one in which she wrote her extraordinary debut novel, The God of Small Things, a semi-autobiographical account of growing up in rural Kerala. The second voice is flatter and angrier, more urban and distrustful of the quirks of the individual. She describes it as "writing from the heart of the crowd". It is this voice that she has used exclusively in the 12 years since her novel was published, in four collections of non-fiction - the latest of which, Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy, was published last week.

Roy, now 47, describes the difference between the two voices as the difference between "dancing and walking". It is a long while since Roy's writing has danced. She says she pedestrianised her imagination not out of choice, not at all, but because there seemed nothing else to do. "If I could," she says, "I would love to spend all my time writing fiction. With the non-fiction I wrote one book that I wanted to write and three more that I didn't."

If I Told You, I'd Have to Kill You

Ernest Hemingway was a spy.

There have been some other illustrious writers who were sneaky little devils. The Guardian has put together a literary spy quiz.

Geeks of the World Have Their Hearts A'Flutter

There's been a recent find. A portion of manuscript written by J.R.R. Tolkien (of Hobbit fame) AND C.S. Lewis (of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe fame). Rejoice!

How Does Porn Screenwriting Work?

This question is answered by the Explainer at Slate.

Give Struggling Authors a Chance

This is the plea of The Atlantic.

From the story...

William Faulkner's first novel, Soldier's Pay barely sold when it was released in 1926. Neither did Saul Bellow's in 1944, Kurt Vonnegut's in 1952, Cormac McCarthy's in 1965, or David Foster Wallace's in 1987. All of these books garnered tepid reviews and bare-minimum sales. Ever since Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1828 debut sold so poorly that the author burned the remaining copies out of embarrassment, flopped first novels have been an American tradition.

Publishers have typically taken the long view, expending great effort and bushels of money to keep struggling authors writing away for years, banking on the hope of eventual literary success. It is to this dedication that we owe America's status as one of the great literary pillars of the world. Now, that dedication is faltering, and with it, the future of the great American novel. But it's not too late to save the novel.

We Break These Book Reports With An Important Bacon Announcement

Thanks, Nick K, for the link.

The Wilderness of Childhood

In the New York Review of Books, Michael Chabon has a pretty swell essay...

Most great stories of adventure, from The Hobbit to Seven Pillars of Wisdom, come furnished with a map. That's because every story of adventure is in part the story of a landscape, of the interrelationship between human beings (or Hobbits, as the case may be) and topography. Every adventure story is conceivable only with reference to the particular set of geographical features that in each case sets the course, literally, of the tale. But I think there is another, deeper reason for the reliable presence of maps in the pages, or on the endpapers, of an adventure story, whether that story is imaginatively or factually true. We have this idea of armchair traveling, of the reader who seeks in the pages of a ripping yarn or a memoir of polar exploration the kind of heroism and danger, in unknown, half-legendary lands, that he or she could never hope to find in life.

This is a mistaken notion, in my view. People read stories of adventure—and write them—because they have themselves been adventurers. Childhood is, or has been, or ought to be, the great original adventure, a tale of privation, courage, constant vigilance, danger, and sometimes calamity. For the most part the young adventurer sets forth equipped only with the fragmentary map—marked here there be tygers and mean kid with air rifle—that he or she has been able to construct out of a patchwork of personal misfortune, bedtime reading, and the accumulated local lore of the neighborhood children.

When Comic Book Heroes Grow Old

Care of the Telegraph.

Epilogue Books in Ballard

Well, this sucks.

Quote of the Week

Words are a lens to focus one's mind.
- Ayn Rand

Reading Obama Books? You are a Threat.

The Baltimore Sun has an interesting story about prison reading...

You've got to love this story for its through-the-looking-glass quality. A super-secure federal prison ruled that two books written by President Obama contain information "potentially detrimental to national security" and rejected an inmate's request to read them.

Top Ten Comic Book Cities

Architect's Journal picks their favorites, including Superman's Metropolis (pictured above). The ten cities are the ten greatest illustrated urban spaces.