TOBI'S DESK

This summer I visited my ancestral home, which is loosely defined as Cleveland, Ohio and tightly defined as any room holding my Great Aunt Laura. She maintains not only my family history (the memory of my great grandmother staying up late playing solitaire, for example) but also a more general understanding of four generations of life in Cleveland.  In the hours I wasn’t rapt around her table, I was reading Dorothy West’s The Wedding . Turned on to West by The Paris Review ’s “ Feminize your Cannon ” column, I tore through her novel of a late-summer wedding. Set within a carefully cultivated black upper-class community in Martha’s Vineyard, The Wedding is the story of the much anticipated nuptials between a daughter of a respected family and the white jazz pianist with whom she has fallen in love. West’s sympathies are teasingly veiled. Through her characters, who span generations and therefore approach the couple’s union differently, she suggests a certain difficulty but not im...

In Valerie Stivers’s  Eat Your Words  series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers.  I’m in Vermont for the summer, living in the town of Winhall, where Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973), an American famous for novels about China, lived during one of the strange closing chapters of her long, strange life. Every day, I pass Pearl Buck Drive and the road to Buck’s summer home. Nearby is the old Liftline lodge on Stratton, where she and the 38-years-younger ‘dancing instructor’ who was her companion in her final years liked to have dinner. After Winhall, Buck, the dancing instructor, and his young, male entourage moved a few mountains over, to Danby, Vermont, where she ended her years, “seated at the window in Chinese silk robes, drawing five or six thousand people each summer as the town’s sole tourist attraction,” according to the excellent and riveting Hilary Spurling biography,  Pearl Buck in China . Houses were meaningful in Buck’s life. S...

1.  An unprovable claim: 95 percent of the existing literature on driverless cars is written in the future tense.  Soon cars will do X , passengers will do Y , and so on. For some, I imagine this stylistic tic generates excitement— look at all the cool stuff that will happen ! As a tech skeptic with a nine-year-old laptop, I can’t help reading chapters full of future tense and hearing a robotic, monotonous tone: “We will be with you shortly .” The future tense lends itself to these tonal interpretations, usually because the focus is on possibilities instead of outcomes. Reading autonomous vehicle literature is like watching clouds: You see a unicorn, I see a tank; neither of us is wrong, necessarily. Except: Why are we out in some field looking at clouds? Don’t we have work? Class? Kids? According to the existing autonomous vehicle (AV) literature, the answer is: What are those? A quick survey of the field reveals less about the underlying technology of AV and more about how...

Nigeria’s leading e-publisher OkadaBooks has partnered with Union Bank of Nigeria, one of the country’s biggest financial institutions, for a writing contest worth N850,000 to the winners and runners-up. The Campus Writing Challenge, for which only undergraduates of Nigerian schools are eligible, will be judged by two winners of the NLNG Nigeria Prize for Literature: Chika […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2or0Vfu

Short Story Day Africa (SSDA), the continent’s most important institution for short fiction, have announced their 2018 Flow Workshops in partnership with the Goethe-Institut. They are inviting applications to attend the workshops in Windhoek, Addis Ababa, and Nairobi. Due to the non-attendance of some accepted participants in the past, a registration fee is now required, […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2wxMPwH

    Liana Finck’s cartoons appear regularly in The New Yorker and on her Instagram feed . Her graphic memoir, Passing for Human , will be out in September.  from The Paris Review https://ift.tt/2NxzYBD

This will be a dream job for a lot of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s millions of fans. Her team is looking for two interns: one must be Lagos-based, the other can live anywhere, both will be paid positions. Needless to say, both must presumably be good writers and thinkers. The Lagos Intern will be someone interested […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2PUwScP

Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone: Legacy of Orisha, the first novel in her YA trilogy which attracted a million dollar advance and is being developed as a film by Fox 2000, has now spent 25 consecutive weeks on The New York Times Young Adult Hardcover Bestseller List. The Nigerian writer shared the news on […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2NDc6wv

In 1962, four years after the successful publication of Things Fall Apart, its British publishers Heinemann Educational Books began the African Writers Series (AWS)—a series of books by African writers packaged to give international voice to the continent’s literature in English. The series published paperback books by most of the major voices of the day: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Steve […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2MCgAqZ

The literary world loves to love Clarice Lispector . The Ukrainian-born Brazilian was undoubtedly one of the most important writers of the 20th century and probably competes only with Borges for the title of Giant of Latin American Letters. Ask any follower of world literature if they’ve read anything from Brazil and they’re likely to at least mention Lispector, and if you’re lucky, perhaps Machado de Assis or Jorge Amado . This is all well and good, but it makes for a grand total of one female author from a country of more than 200 million people. Lispector aside, there are a number of incredible female writers, both temporary and 20th-century, who deserve a spot in the canon of world literature. In honor of Women in Translation Month, which ends today, here are five. 1. Tatiana Salem Levy I first came across Levy in Granta’s The Best of Young Brazilian Novelists . Her debut work A Chave da Casa , published in English as The House in Smyrna (translated by  Alison Entreki...