A Greek comic book is taking the literary world by storm. It was a hit at last week’s London Book Fair and is already being touted by Publisher’s Weekly as the “most far-out and exciting” galley to get your hands on at Book Expo America, which begins May 28th.

I’ll let Alison Flood of The Guardian describe it:

“An unexpected kind of comic book hero is set to emerge this autumn: Bertrand Russell, the philosopher, logician, mathematician and Nobel prize for literature winner who wrote the seminal work on mathematical logic, the Principia Mathematica.

Russell, who died aged 97 in 1970, is starring in a graphic novel based on his life, Logicomix, which portrays the great pacifist’s quest to pin down the foundations of mathematics. First published in Greece last year, where it has become an unexpected bestseller, Logicomix, subtitled “An Epic Search for Truth,” is the brainchild of maths expert and novelist Apostolos Doxiadis, who was admitted to Columbia University at the tender age of 15.

Covering a span of 60 years, it tells the story of Russell’s life, taking in his childhood, brought up by his grandparents after he was orphaned aged four, his four marriages, the writing of his great work Principia Mathematica, his rivalry with Ludwig Wittgenstein, and his quest for nuclear disarmament in the last decades of his life.”

Logicomix will be available in the U.S. on September 28th. I can’t wait!

LINK:
- Logicomix

Google Lit Trips (see my last post) — a lovely integration of books and technology — is just the most recent effort I’ve seen concerning this topic. I’ve been thinking a lot about books and technology over the past couple of months, looking at presentations from O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing ‘09 and listening to podcasts from South by Southwest ‘09 (couldn’t afford to attend either one).

One interesting thing I’ve discovered is that I always end up thinking about the actual object: the book. Not the content, which can be displayed and dispersed in a myriad of ways, but the physical object consisting of print and paper.

So I was pleased to find this exhibit at the University of Central Florida Art Gallery which looks at books as dimensional objects with print, within which a narrative unfolds. “If reading can include visual and semantic aspects,” it asks, “then precisely what ratio determines when a sculpture becomes a book or when it functions as a sculpture alluding to books?”

I must admit that I find the physical presence of a book — its dust jacket, weight, dimensions, paper quality, font, margins — important and often extremely pleasing.  But then I am also quite partial to sculpture as an art form.  Are the two connected? Or is my pleasure merely due to the fact that I’m accustomed to the book’s physical form as a part of the reading experience? Is then reading as joyful if this aspect is stripped away?

Which sweeps me back around the circle to technology. Are electronic reading devices the wave of the future? Is it as delicious to read fiction on a screen rather than on paper? That’s hard to imagine.

LINKS:
- TypeBound

I recently heard about Google Lit Trips, so I went to take a look. Created by teacher Jerome Burg, it’s a way to combine the un-multimedia experience of reading with the uber-multimedia experience of Google Earth. For an excellent description of how Google Lit Trips works, see “Google Lit Trips: Bringing Travel Tales to Life.”

The first trip I “took” was Voltaire’s Candide, whose eponymous protagonist (that’s a mouthful) travels from Europe to South America to Turkey. It was fun to see the trajectory of his journey and there were many resources, such as ancient maps, that I could look at. But rather than poring over all this stuff online, what the lit trip really made me want to do was read Candide.

I bought the English-language Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition a couple of years ago because I loved the cover and hadn’t read the book. (I always feel as though I’m being lazy if I read a French book in English, especially when I need to keep up my French.) Despite the language un-barrier, as soon as I got off the computer, I pulled my Candide off the shelf and it’s now in the queue.

On the plus side, I’ll be reading Candide soon. On the minus side, I can’t help but have an uncomfortably Luddite reaction against the whole idea of Google Lit Trips because fiction is supposed to be internal not external. In very broad outlines, film is a visual medium, the beauty of drama is its spoken language, and fiction is just the reader and the words. Google Lit Trips takes the images the author is trying to paint in your head and replaces (augments?) them with real-life images.

Everyone is trying these days to attract the techy next generation to reading, or to lure those busy gaming and tweeting back to the fold. But is the beauty of fiction the fact that you don’t have to be bothered by the real world for a little while?

LINKS:
- Voltaire’s Candide (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
- Google Lit Trips

The next Harry Potter (its publisher Scholastic hopes) will be The 39 Clues, due to hit shelves on September 9th.  But no matter how well this first book (in a planned series of 10) sells, it won’t be the next Harry Potter because 1) it’s a series planned by a publisher and contracted out to a series of writers as opposed to being the obsessive idea of an aspiring author; and more importantly 2) it’s purposely geared to “non-readers.”

Who writes a book for non-readers?  Personally, I write for people who want to read, not those who don’t.

Oh yeah, I forgot — it wasn’t created by a writer.  The 39 Clues is a ”multidimensional thing,” according to Scholastic executive editorial director David Levithan.  It includes games and prizes and movies and blogs and an extensive website.  So it’s really not a novel so much as a multi-media project that Scholastic hopes will bring in some badly needed cash.

The truth is that publishing is not a big-money gig.  There have always been more non-readers than readers, those who would rather (and rather do) watch TV than pick up a book.  And now there’s gaming, which has replaced TV for a whole lot of people (my nephew, for example).  I’m not judging, as Oprah would say (feel free to judge my sincerity on that).  I’m just stating facts.

 So why are publishers trying to lure non-readers?  Because that’s where the money is.  Publishing is a business and its stockholders expect a return, and there’s not much margin to be made on books.

So does that mean future authors need to be thinking in terms of multimedia empires, the same way pop stars are extending themselves to perfumes and handbags?  (Maybe I could have my own line of lunch boxes – turn back the tide on insulated-eco-friendly soft-packs.  Picture chiming tin with stiff plastic clips instead of zippers and glass-lined thermoses.  Yum.)

Stay tuned for part deux.

(Just a thought – I would love to see an India-inspired clothing line by Jhumpa Lahiri.)

As soon as I heard about FontStruct, I created an account for myself and started fonting away. I discovered that making fonts is easy with FontStruct! But making good fonts is not. I cleverly named by debut font “Strapless,” imagining it would be as slender yet curvaceous as John Singer Sargent’s famous Madame X. I should have called it Crapatino. Oh well.

LINKS:
- FontStruct
- Dyspepsia font

Their story is interwoven with various versions of the Biblical Noah story as translated (by Norman) from the Inuit. These Noah stories describe what happens to the ark and its denizens when the flood carries them north to Canada.

In every version, Noah refuses help from the Inuit villagers (they fear he will starve over the winter); he refuses to let the villagers eat any of the animals on his ship (and he won’t eat them either); and at the end of winter, his ark sinks due to damage from the inevitable ice melt and he heads south on foot, never to be seen again.

Noah’s arrogance (or maybe faith?) is just as unwavering as the villagers’ desire to taste his beasts’ meats.

The combination of these stories with that of Norman and Tanizaki’s friendship seemed odd to me at first—too disparate. But the two ultimately worked together, illustrating Norman’s first experiences as a translator (in contrast to veteran translator Tanizaki) while also setting the memoire firmly inside its geography.

When I first read Howard Norman several years ago, I thought he was a Canadian writer because he described life on Hudson Bay so beautifully (read The Northern Lights). I’ve since learned that Mr. Norman is from the non-Canadian city of Toledo, Ohio. But he’s spent a good deal of time in Canada (see the Ploughshares profile linked below) and brings it to life so vividly it’ll make you want to visit.

A beautiful writer.

LINKS:
- Howard Norman (Powell’s Books)
- “About Howard Norman: A Profile”

This is my most favorite way – browsing the shelves – to discover writers I haven’t heard of. About 15 years ago I discovered Sherman Alexie in a college library and fell in love with his short stories and poetry. (He wasn’t faced out, of course, but I was reading the stacks starting with the As.)

So after reading a few of Keret’s stories – they range from a few hundred words to a few pages long – I started thinking about what it will be like if/when the giant chain-linked brick-and-mortar bookstores go the way of the Caribbean monk seal. Will the independents come back? Or will people rely even more on publicity pushes and the best-seller lists to order their books, sight un-read, online? Does anyone just browse the stacks anymore?

I hope so, but back to Etgar Keret. The Publishers Weekly review on Amazon says “[d]espite an appealing, comic voice, many of these pieces feel insubstantial and leave the reader indifferent.” I disagree strongly, but perhaps that’s because I’m partial to the short short story, am familiar with and appreciate the form’s artistry. Who knows what that reviewer was thinking?

As a side note, Keret’s stories would be perfect for cell phone reading. I’m not comparing his stories to the cell phone novels – actually composed on cell phones – that are the latest fad in Japanese lit. I’m talking about books that are formatted to be read on your handheld device.

For instrux on how to download free books to your device, see the link below.

And be sure to read Keret’s super glue story.

Links:
- Etgar Keret
- Sherman Alexie
- Caribbean monk seal
- “Thumbs Race as Japan’s Best Sellers Go Cellular”
- “Download free books on your PDA or cellphone”

P.S. Not sure if “flush” is a joke or a typo in panel 5. Am I picky or just humor impaired?  Ryan fixed it.

Links:
- Dinosaur Comics: “Autobiography still not working out”

The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) is holding its seventh annual festival this weekend – June 7 and 8, 2008 – at 594 Broadway (Suite 401), just below Houston.

Attendance will probably be around 6,000 compared to the over 60,000 at New York’s ComicCon. I’m sure the gigantic cons are fun if you crave teeming hordes and lots of movie and movie-star promotion. But if you don’t like getting dirty looks for holding up the line by having a tiny conversation with the artist or writer, then check this one out.

If you go, be sure to mark your schedule for Rebecca Donner (2:30-3:30pm on Saturday) and Alex Robinson (12:10-1:20pm on Sunday), one of my favorite graphic novelists (loved Box Office Poison, can’t wait for Too Cool to be Forgotten).

Links:
- MoCCA Art Festival 2008
- Rebecca Donner
- Alex Robinson

LINKS:
- BEA: 2008 Authors Studio
- Book Expo Podcast
- Kelly Link