TOBI'S DESK

Nnedi Okorafor recently ran into an issue with her newly acquired Tesla. And CEO/co-founder of Tesla Inc. Elon Musk, fresh off his short-lived hiatus from Twitter, could not resist giving her a hand. Here’s what happened. On November 1, Okorafor tweeted about how her condominium board members refused her request for an electric car charging […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2Y3gfzW

Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, 2010 winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book (Africa), and  Nnamdi Oguike, one of the winners of the 2019 Miles Morland Foundation Writing Scholarship, are among the writers lined up for events at the 2019 Crater Literary Festival. An initiative of Crater Library & Publisher in collaboration with AfricaWeek […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2L8P8hA

Jill Talbot’s column,  The Last Year ,   traces the moments before her daughter leaves for college. It has run every Friday this month, and will return for a month each in the winter, spring, and summer. The next installment will arrive the first Friday of January.  My mother bought the kitchen table in 1969. It’s dark maple, four chairs, their backs a row of five slats. The etchings of my math homework mark the wood, but the busiest scratches cover the space between my parents’ seats, like the ghosts of all they passed across the table and what they must have said. My mother always sat across from me, my father to my left, and eventually my daughter, Indie, sat across from my father. When he died suddenly in 2017, my mother sat in her chair at the table calling friends, one by one, to tell them he was gone. I don’t remember eating at the table after that. On the morning after my mother’s funeral a little over a year later, I sat in my chair at the table writing checks,...

It’s hard to keep up with Nnedi Okorafor. One minute she’s creating a TV production company for Africanfuturist stories, the next she’s winning the Nommo Award. What we’re currently excited about, though, is Okorafor’s upcoming book, Ikenga. Okorafor recently revealed the book’s cover on social media. 🚨 Cover reveal 🚨 My next novel IKENGA (due […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2KYACce

The second season of our celebrated podcast is here to carry you away from all the troublesome sounds of Thanksgiving squabbles. And if you’d like to know how something so excruciatingly exquisite gets made, read on for a behind-the-scenes interview with executive producer John DeLore. He is a senior editor and tenured audio engineer at Stitcher’s NYC studio. In addition to The Paris Review Podcast,  he has worked on Stranglers , Beautiful/Anonymous , The Longest Shortest Time , Couric , Clear + Vivid with Alan Alda , Fake the Nation , The Sporkful , and  Household Name . He answered some questions from our engagement editor, Rhian Sasseen, about his preferred microphones, the differences between Season 1 and Season 2, and how to respect both the language and the listener. INTERVIEWER In the spirit of the many times “pencil versus pen?” has been asked in The Paris Review ’s Writers at Work interviews, what’s your preferred setup for recording? JOHN DELORE Most of...

In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words  series, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. My thrifty-housewife version of Ma’s “scrap bag” is this colorful mixture of sanding sugar left over from children’s parties. l used it to make sparkling cranberries for the top of a vinegar pie from the book Farmer Boy . Everyone who grew up on the Little House books has their own particular treasured food memory from the books. How Pa butchered the pig, smoked the meat, and used every bit of it, down to inflating the empty bladder for the girls to play with as a balloon. The spring on Plum Creek when they ran out of food and ate only fried fish and “crisp, juicy” turnips. Ma frying “vanity cake” doughnuts, so named because they’re “all puffed up, like vanity, with nothing solid inside.” Almanzo stuffing himself from the following spread at the county fair: pumpkin pie, custard pie, vinegar pie, mince pie, berry pies, cream pies, raisin pies … Reading these books—or rere...

Tomi Adeyemi’s much-anticipated Children of Virtue and Vengeance, the second installment of her Legacy of Orïsha trilogy, is the December book club read for Good Morning America, a highly successful morning show on ABC. In introducing the novel, Good Morning America host Robin Roberts said that the novel could be described as “a cross between Game of Thrones and Black […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2KYNyPg

We all like to think of our literary heroes as immortal — especially Professor Wole Soyinka. For so long, this venerable figure of African letters appeared untouched by age and time; indeed, he turned 85 this year. So it came across as a real shock when we learned that Soyinka had been previously diagnosed with […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2qOltn4

Every week, the editors of The Paris Review  lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by  signing up for the Redux newsletter . Jack Kerouac, ca. 1956. Photo: Tom Palumbo. This week at The Paris Review , we’re thinking about travel—by train, plane, car, or bus. Read on for Jack Kerouac’s Art of Fiction interview , W. S. Merwin’s essay “ Flight Home ,” and Paulé Bártón’s poem “ The Sleep Bus .” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not  subscribe  to  The Paris Review  and read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door.   Jack Kerouac, The Art of Fiction No. 41 Issue no. 43 (Summer 1968) I spent my entire youth writing slowly with revisions and endless rehashing speculation and deleting and got so I was writing one sentence ...

Drawing of project for Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina. Architectural design by Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius. Photo of original work taken in Harvard Art Museums. Via Wikimedia Commons. Grouping writers into “schools” has always been problematic. The so-called Black Mountain poets never identified themselves as such, but the facts of their union spring from a remarkable instance of artistic community: Black Mountain College and the web of interactions the place occasioned. Founded in the mountains of western North Carolina in 1933 and closed by 1956, the college was one of the most significant experiments in arts and education of the twentieth century. In recent years, a number of international exhibitions and publications have showcased the range of artwork produced at the college’s two campuses, the first situated in the YMCA Blue Ridge Assembly, and the second at Lake Eden in the Swannanoa Valley. The list of famous names associated with Black Mountain is ...

John Vincler’s column Brush Strokes  examines what is it that we can find in paintings in our increasingly digital world.  Vija Celmins, Untitled (Ocean), 1973. Collection of Aaron I. Fleischman © Vija Celmins, courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery Open sea water seen from above. Star-filled skies. Stones. Gray after gray: from the graphite of pencils, charcoal on paper and its erasure, oil paint in layer after layer of deep, smooth near-black. Forays into ochre and midnight blues, the earthen tones of sand and stone, then returning seemingly always to gray. Before seeing the objects, works on paper, and paintings gathered together at the Met Breuer for the immense Vija Celmins’s retrospective, “ To Fix the Image in Memory ,” I had previously witnessed the gnostic perfection of the later paintings of ocean waves and night skies. The Breuer exhibition was the first time I was able to trace in person the artist’s development from the early paintings of obje...

A South African production company, KIWI Films, has recently optioned novelist Kopano Matlwa’s debut Coconut for a feature film adaptation. The Pontas Agency, Matlwa’s agents, announced the sale of the novel’s audiovisual rights on November 21, 2019.   View this post on Instagram   Kopano Matlwa’s novel COCONUT will be adapted as a feature feature […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/37AAedG

In August 2019, we reported that the North American rights to Cameroonian novelist Imbolo Mbue’s second novel, How Beautiful We Were, had been acquired by Penguin Random House. UK and Commonwealth rights were acquired by Canongate books in October 2019. Now, we are excited to learn that Penguin Random House has finally provided a synopsis […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/35tsmc2

© paul / Adobe Stock. “Nigger music,” he said. He paused and thought deeply for a moment. “Yeah, that’s what we do: full on nigger music. It’s fucking great.” I wasn’t quite sure what to say so I leaned into the couch and mumbled something like, “That sounds fascinating. I’ve got to come see that sometime.” San Francisco hipsters filled the corners of the dark apartment. Outside, a light rain came down around the city. Conversations oscillated between fashion and music. I could have talked to so many people but I had chosen this skinny musician who had tried to French kiss me earlier. In that moment, he seemed like a true artist to me—someone who created, revised, destroyed, and rebuilt in an effort to understand the world. And, he played nigger music. Was it a travesty or a triumph that this skinny, five-o’clock-shadowed white guy had so comfortably described his band’s style of music to me, a skinny, five-o’clock-shadowed black guy, as none other than “nigger music”? He apparen...