TOBI'S DESK

Africa Writes 2019 Brought to you by the Royal African Society Friday 5th July – Sunday 7th July 2019 British Library, 96 Euston Rd, London NW1 2DB Africa Writes returns for an exciting summer weekend at the British Library celebrating the best contemporary literature from Africa and the diaspora. Save the dates in your diaries for a rich and vibrant programme of book launches, panel discussions, performances, masterclasses, education events, family workshops and an international book fair.   Excited…? Follow us on  Twitter ,  Facebook  and  Instagram Keep an eye out for our ticket announcement in early March Join the Royal African Society   as a member to receive priority booking and an amazing 40% ticket discount.     Africa Writes London 2019 is supported by Arts Council England, British Council, and hosted by the British Library.                     ...

Africa Writes 2019 – Bristol Saturday 29th June – Thursday 4th July Save the dates for a series of book launches, panels, performances and workshops celebrating contemporary literature from Africa, the South West and the diaspora. The programme will include a full day of activities on the Saturday, followed by a series of evening events across the city. Take a look at the programme for the Africa Writes Pop-Up Festival in Bristol, held in in 2017. More info coming soon… from Africa Writes https://ift.tt/2NtAfX6

As this review goes to press, Benjamin Dreyer ’s Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style , sits at #1 on Amazon’s Best Sellers list ( Business & Professional Humor ). Shortly after the book’s release, he tweeted its march up the sales ranks, as it broke the top hundred, the top ten, and made it all the way to number two. Already in its fourth pressing, it is also currently at number two on this week’s New York Times Best Sellers list (Advice, How-to, and Miscellaneous) . Think about that: a book by a copyeditor about the niceties of style elbowing up to the table with the likes of Marie Kondo and Michelle Obama . As Dreyer himself said in another endearingly flabbergasted tweet, “It’s a freakin’ style guide, for Pete’s sake.” In one sense, I share his amazement. It would be difficult to think of a current subject that feels, superficially, less likely to top a list of best sellers (or best-sellers or bestsellers—Dreyer devotes an interesting page to the a...

In our current dystopia, the prescient science fiction of Octavia Butler  only resonates more, so it makes perfect sense that her novels, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents , will be reissued by Grand Central Publishing in April. Entertainment Weekly has a preview of the new cover , along with an introduction written by N.K. Jemisin . “Butler does not appear to have intended the Parable novels to be a guidebook—and yet they are,” writes Jemisin. “That’s true for all of the most powerful science fiction novels: they offer not only accurate visions of the future, but also suggestions for coping with the resulting changes.” Image credit: Grand Central Publishing The post N.K. Jemisin on Octavia Butler appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions https://ift.tt/2Uag82I

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 . Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne, and their daughter, Quintana Roo. The Oscars were on Sunday, and we’ve got movies on the brain. This week, we’re reading John Gregory Dunne on the Art of Screenwriting , Susan Minot’s short story “ The Man Who Would Not Go Away ,” and Chase Twichell’s poem “ Bad Movie, Bad Audience .” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not  subscribe to read the entire archive ? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door.   John Gregory Dunne, The Art of Screenwriting No. 2 Issue no. 138 (Spring 1996) What the screenwriter is ceding to the director is pace, mood, style, point of view, which in a book are the f...

Our favorite poet/sports correspondent is back, this time with a meditation on Lionel Messi. Lionel Messi / Agencia de Noticias ANDES On a sunny Saturday afternoon in Seville. On an overcast morning in New York. Sometime past midnight in Tokyo. A Saturday in Abidjan. This is how you live now. This is how you have lived for nearly half of your life. You’re in one place, playing a game, which to say doing your job, which is playing a game. You’re in one place and you’re in all possible places; at times encircled, at times cursored, at times turned into a digital shroud of statistics that mark how fast you’ve run at your fastest. The shorn-smooth grass you walk on—you mostly walk, like a painter let loose on a meadow, while everyone else runs as though late for a meeting—is black ice for the rest of us. We see you there, infected with data. We watch you in the simulacrum. We love you because the simulacrum tells us to love you. We hate you because the simulacrum tells us to hate y...

As a writer, I know I’m on the right path when I feel afraid to sit down to work every day; and as a reader, I’m most drawn to stories that confront the terrors, as well as the beauties, of being human. Horror and its handmaidens—fear, disgust, revulsion, dread, panic—are great teachers; by daring us to look away, they invite us to look closer. If you want to know what sickens a society, investigate its most disturbing art; the answers, usually, are there. None of the following titles would be classified as horror in your local bookstore, because horror itself is not the point of these narratives; rather, their power to disturb is the result of their unflinching insistence on exposing the horror (which in daily life is treated as mundane, if it is treated any way at all)—of life, sex, and love under patriarchy. Representing work from Japan, Canada, Argentina, France, Austria, England, and the U.S., speaking from the 1930s to today, these 10 women writers are just a handful of storytel...

Lil Uzi Vert. Photo: Spike Jordan. Photo courtesy of Atlantic Records. I spent a lot of 2017 in schools, and I imagine that I will spend a lot of future years in schools. Because of this, I spend a lot of time talking to people younger than I am, and I spend a lot of time talking to them about music. This creates an interesting discussion point for me—I spent 2017 remembering that when I was young and wanted to talk to someone older about music, I mostly wanted validation that the thing I liked was not, in fact, awful. This had mixed results in my teenage years. My love of the so-called “shiny suit era” had its detractors, many of them older than me, many of them longing for the days of what they imagined to be “real hip-hop.” The question I spent most of my time answering in 2017 was how I felt about what is now called “mumble rap” in the popular discourse—rappers who eschew lyrical prowess in the name of drum-heavy trap beats and melodic choruses. If there’s one thing that’s for ...

Here’s a quick look at some notable books—new titles from the likes of  Patrick Radden Keefe ,  Jen Beagin ,  Irvine Welsh  and more—that are publishing this week. Want to learn more about upcoming titles? Then go read our  most recent book preview . Want to help The Millions keep churning out great books coverage? Then  sign up to be a member  today. Vacuum in the Dark  by  Jen Beagin Here’s what  Publishers Weekly  had to say about  Vacuum in the Dark : “Beagin’s sharp and superb novel finds Mona, from previous novel  Pretend I’m Dead , now 26, living in Taos, N.Mex., having followed the dying wishes of her ex-boyfriend, a man she met at a needle exchange and called Mr. Disgusting. Mona cleans houses for a living, shares a ranch house with an older married couple she calls Yoko and Yoko, and claims  Fresh Air ’s Terry Gross as an imaginary friend-slash-therapist. Prone to falling in love wit...

Though The Wife didn’t take home any Oscars last night, the book world remained gleeful that one of their own, Meg Wolitzer , was there to celebrate the film adaptation of her 2003 novel. Wolitzer details the odd experience of seeing her characters brought to life on the screen in The New York Times : “While I always try to burrow into my perceptions in order to create characters, I am stopped short of actually visualizing them with police-artist precision. For me, facial blurriness comes with the territory, and I’ve grown accustomed to it over the years I’ve been writing fiction.” Image credit: Graeme Hunter/Sony Pictures Classics The post Meg Wolitzer Goes Hollywood (Again) appeared first on The Millions . from The Millions https://ift.tt/2EvVa98

The unnamed protagonist of Gébé’s Letter to Survivors is a mail carrier who traverses a barren, desertlike landscape on a bicycle. Because this story takes place in the aftermath of some probably nuclear apocalypse, he wears a hazmat suit, his mask protruding comically like a duck’s bill. He travels from bunker to bunker, shouting the contents of strange letters down to former suburbanites huddled in dim squalor. Never before available in English, Letter to Survivors  has just been published by New York Review Comics  in a translation by Edward Gauvin. Below, the postman arrives with a message describing a painter who gets paid by a mysterious fat cat to black out, square by square, an original Modigliani.                                   Gébé (Georges Blondeaux, 1929–2004) was a fixture of the French press for almost fifty years. He was best known as a ...