TOBI'S DESK

South African novelist Zukiswa Wanner has been awarded the 2020 Goethe Medal. The official honor by The German government is annually conferred by Goethe-Institut, on individuals “who have made an outstanding contribution to international cultural exchange”. Wanner, who is the first female African awardee, received the medal alongside Bolivian artist and museum director Elvira Espejo […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2xnq6aU

As one effect of the current global pandemic, teachers and professors across the world have moved their classes online. Namwali Serpell recently reinvigorated the notion of remote-teaching by “tweaching” — tweeting a lecture for a course she is currently teaching at the University of California-Berkeley, ENGL 145: Writing Technology. Update: I twaught. https://t.co/HdjpdWCi31 https://t.co/3steOIrWe7 — […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/3d46uYv

Last week, Nnedi Okorafor took to Instagram and Facebook to share some really big news with her fan. She has a new novella coming out. Her fans must be ecstatic. Here are all the details we have so far about the new book. The forthcoming sci-fi novella is titled Remote Control and is being published […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2VS8duj

A selection of the author’s childhood birds. My mother remembers five separate deaths: tumor, disappearance, mauled by neighborhood animal, injury, and a fly-away. I remember four different colors; together we recall three names. We had these birds over six years—I think. Much of my childhood is foggy and uncertain. It’s shrouded, or sometimes replaced, by stories I’ve told myself and others. I’m concerned about why I can’t remember our birds clearly. How many did we have? I adored them; they were our bright things in a dark house. A scene that I remember: My piano teacher sitting in a green chair, bald and patient. I’m sitting beside him on a piano bench, grinning because I have a secret. I pull out Bach. I pull out Duvernoy’s “School of Mechanism.” My piano teacher asks me what else I have in my bag. When I laugh, I look like a beaver; three index cards could fit between my front teeth. I reach to the bottom and pull out a cardboard box. A weight shifts around as I open the flaps...

© Jeff McCollough (AdobeStock) “It’s an elegy for New York,” my friend texts me. She’s just finished my book. It’s the end of February. We find barstools at a packed restaurant bar before a reading at St. Mark’s Church. “We’re ordering months of medication in case the supply chain fails,” she says, “and hand sanitizer—and masks. Masks, can you believe it.” Like me, she and her husbands are journalists, they’re hearing things from some of our friends in the field. She tells me she thinks people will still read the book, words of reassurance that only provoke anxiety. I think she sounds paranoid, like she’s speaking from a place of some dark cultish extremism. The next two weeks change the world. Schools close. We need to rush the audiobook recording into three days, taping over the weekend. I take the subway for the last time, without knowing it, one of only three people in the entire car. Days before, I’d waited on a crammed platform for a train so jammed with bodies we couldn’t al...

Tom Gauld was born in 1976 and grew up in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. He is a cartoonist and illustrator, and his work is published in the  Guardian ,  The New Yorker , and  New Scientist . His comic books— Baking with Kafka ,  Mooncop ,  You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack , and  Goliath —are published by Drawn & Quarterly. He lives in London with his family. From   Department of Mind-Blowing Theories , by Tom Gauld. Excerpt courtesy of Drawn & Quarterly . from The Paris Review https://ift.tt/3f74Nvt

What has Chimamanda Adichie been reading while staying at home during the current pandemic? In a series of stories-clips posted recently on her Instagram, Adichie shared three pieces of writing she’s been reading. The first is a poem, a favorite of hers, that she says “just feels very apt for this period.” The second and […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2WfZj8O

“You are not the first of my patients to mention that,” my omnipotent therapist said when I sat on her couch and voiced some deep-seated feelings about the film adaptation of André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name . Funny how the best and worst thing your psychologist can say to you is the same. Here was the coach of my tenderest soul saying that I was not unique in the world—how dare she! On the other hand, maybe it would be nice not to be alone. Reading Normal People by Sally Rooney and then watching the very convincing Hulu adaptation, to be released today, I wondered if that was the spell of this story as well. Rooney addresses the contradiction again and again: the fundamental tension between being independent and needing to be understood, between wanting to be uncategorizable and wanting to belong. Before I watched the series, with only the novel throwing light motes on my subconscious, I wondered if there were oceans of young reading women who saw themselves in the prickly chara...

In the column “Inside Story,” parents share the books they are reading with their children to get through these times. Edo era poet Matsuo Bashō By late February of this year, the virus had made me sufficiently nervous that I began packing to leave San Francisco I wanted to go to my family home on the coast of California where I had grown up. It was isolated and my parents had always kept a pantry stuffed with dry goods, plenty of toilet paper, and two freezers filled with food in the garage. This semi-survivalist attitude had seemed an extreme and eccentric way to live when I was a child; now it seemed like we had reached the dreaded moment for which they were always preparing. As soon as my son and I arrived, I began to prepare the garden, planting the seeds my mother had left in the pantry before I had abruptly moved her into a nursing home in December. Then I turned my attention to homeschooling. In school, my son, Ewan, had been instructed in something called new math, which ...

Tom Gauld was born in 1976 and grew up in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. He is a cartoonist and illustrator, and his work is published in the  Guardian ,  The New Yorker , and  New Scientist . His comic books— Baking with Kafka ,  Mooncop ,  You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack , and  Goliath —are published by Drawn & Quarterly. He lives in London with his family. From   Department of Mind-Blowing Theories , by Tom Gauld. Excerpt courtesy of Drawn & Quarterly . from The Paris Review https://ift.tt/2yTKdOm

One of the best things about literature is its ability to transport you into a world removed from your own. But what’s probably even better is when you, as a reader, get to dwell in that world over the course of not one, but three, books. Here, we’re listing eight trilogies by African writers that […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2zIRZeB

For the rest of the week, we’ll publish a strip each day from Tom Gauld’s new collection Department of Mind-Blowing Theories , in which the acclaimed cartoonist and illustrator trains his trademark wit on the wonderful world of science. Tom Gauld was born in 1976 and grew up in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. He is a cartoonist and illustrator, and his work is published in the  Guardian ,  The New Yorker , and  New Scientist . His comic books— Baking with Kafka ,  Mooncop ,  You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack , and  Goliath —are published by Drawn & Quarterly. He lives in London with his family. From Department of Mind-Blowing Theories , by Tom Gauld. Excerpt courtesy of Drawn & Quarterly . from The Paris Review https://ift.tt/2VKUxRN

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 . Carl Phillips in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in 2018. Photo courtesy of Reston Allen. This week at The Paris Review , we’re closing out National Poetry Month with a celebration of the poets in our archive. Read on for Carl Phillips’s Art of Poetry interview ; “ Eclogue ,” a rare piece of prose from May Swenson; and Nin Andrews’s poem “ Poets on Poets .” 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. And for as long as we’re flattening the curve,  The Paris Review  will be sending out a new weekly newsletter, The ...

© robert / Adobe Stock. It begins in this way: It’s as if we are dead and somehow have been given the unheard-of opportunity to see the life we lived, the way we lived it: there we are with friends we had just run into by accident and the surprise on our faces (happy surprise, sour surprise) as we clasp each other (close or not so much) and say things we might mean totally or say things we only mean somewhat, but we never say bad things, we only say bad things when the person we are clasping is completely out of our sight; and everything is out of immediate sight and yet there is everything in immediate sight; the streets so crowded with people from all over the world and why don’t they return from wherever it is they come from and everybody comes from nowhere for nowhere is the name of every place, all places are nowhere, nowhere is where we all come from; the dresses hanging in a store window that are meant for people half my age are so appealing and the waist of this dress is sm...

In this series, writers present the books they’re finally making time for.  Melancholy is a condition unsuited to a pandemic. Like ennui, it is an ailment born of stability. The strong light of catastrophe withers it. COVID -19 has prevented the indolence melancholy requires, even as its variants—anxiety, panic, vertigo—have bloomed in quarantine. If one is not already longing for melancholy, surely one has begun longing for the conditions in which it was once possible. Perhaps this is why I’ve finally chosen to read Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy after many years of owning it. (I’ve not yet finished it; I’m not sure to what extent anyone can be said to have finished such a book.) “If you will describe melancholy,” Burton writes, “describe a phantasticall conceipt, a corrupt imagination, vaine thoughts and different, which who can doe?” The book sets this pessimism spinning like a top, whirling delightedly over local resentments and cosmic griefs alike. It is a labyr...

With everyone at home due to social distancing, various literary organizations and children-focused media houses are being creative about ways to entertain children and families stuck at home. Penguin Young Readers, Random House Children’s Books, and PBS KIDS are partnering in a special collaboration to launch Mondays with Michelle Obama. The limited run show features […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/3f10IbR

For the past few weeks, the need to combat COVID-19 with social-distancing has led to closure of many public institutions, including libraries and public schools. The NYT reports that “with countries across the globe on lockdown and public life at a standstill, more than 1.5 billion children are out of school.” Kids are at home […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/3cQttWQ

Queen Sono is Netflix’s first African series. The spy thriller was created by Kagiso Lediga and stars Pearl Thusi as the titular character. The story chronicles the exciting life of a South African secret agent who takes on dangerous criminals in high-level espionage. Queen is everything you’ve ever wished for in a crime hero. She […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/3bGK930

Teju Cole announced on Facebook that he will be hosting an online workshop for writers and photographers. The workshop, titled “Paragraph/Photograph,” will take place across three consecutive Sundays in May. The application deadline is Wednesday, April 29, at 5pm EST (9pm GMT). There are three conditions for applying to the workshop. Read Cole’s post below […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2y4HUbe

In March,  The Paris Review  launched  The Art of Distance, a newsletter highlighting unlocked archive pieces that resonate with the staff of   the magazine , quarantine-appropriate writing on the  Daily , resources from our peer organizations,  and more. Read Emily Nemens’s introductory letter  here , and find the latest unlocked archive pieces below. “In celebration of the warmer days soon to come, this installment of The Art of Distance is devoted to spring—to stories, poems, and other pieces that put us in mind of the season’s hope, bounty, and optimism. Spring has sprung in these pages, at least.” —Craig Morgan Teicher, Digital Director Photo: Dominicus Johannes Bergsma. I’m watching spring blossom through the window of my sister’s childhood bedroom; the sun is bright, the breeze is cold, and the birds are louder here than in Manhattan. Reading William Styron’s “ Letter to an Editor ,” the preface to issue no. 1, I imagine that the spring of ...

Allan Ramsay, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1766 In his last unfinished work, Reveries of the Solitary Walker , composed in the two years before his death in 1778, Jean-Jacques Rousseau set forth his vision for a writing life lived beyond the confines of community. ‘So now I am alone in the world, with no brother, neighbour or friend, nor any company left me but my own…[D]etached as I am from them and from the whole world, what am I? This must now be the object of my inquiry.’ After a scandal erupted in 1762 about the unorthodox religion in one of his books, Rousseau spent the next eight years in exile from Paris, wandering around Switzerland, England, and the French provinces. Having previously occupied a place at the centre of civilised society—secretary to the French Ambassador in Venice, friend of the philosopher Diderot, protected by rich patrons, ‘acclaimed, made much of, and welcomed with open arms’—Rousseau became gripped by the paranoid belief that he was an object of universal d...