- USA Today has a thoroughly charming profile of local comics creator Robert Kirkman focusing on the AMC adaptation of The Walking Dead into a TV series that will air this fall (first ep directed by Frank Darabont, no less): "However, as much as producers offer him cameos as a zombie in the show, there will be no shambling in his future. "I like TV and I enjoy watching shows, and getting to watch your own comic book as a show seems like a pretty cool thing," he says. "If I were sitting there and I saw myself walking by on screen, that would just ruin it for me. I don't want to see myself up there. Yuck!” "
- Wonderful writer Samantha Hunt gives Ellen Bryson's The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortunato the thumbs up in today's WaPo: "Set in the months between President Lincoln's assassination and the museum's fiery demise, Ellen Bryson's novel "The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno" creates a fantastic mood of claustrophobia. Her characters patrol the hallways of the museum, haunting its arboretums, lecture halls, menageries and aquariums, creeping among its waxworks, scientific-ish dioramas and oddball memorabilia." Sounds like exactly my kind of book.
- Swati Avasthi on "evolving voice in the young adult novel": "Voice is the circulatory system of a YA novel: it streams from one vital organ to the next, gives us the novel's pulse, and brings oxygen and life to otherwise sluggish words. Without voice, the energy is drained; with it, anything is possible."
- Laura Miller wrote a terrific piece on the despair of the neverending slush pile, which you've probably already read. There's a response from John Williams at The Second Pass that's well worth reading too: "The slush pile's main strength is as an unintentional source of hilarity. At Harper's, a good friend and I were particularly thrilled by regular dispatches from a reader in New Jersey, long essays that included crude, hand-drawn illustrations and many sentences like these: "The sun is made of hydrogen. THAT IS A FACT!!” "
- A lengthy NYT Magazine profile of David Mitchell: "David Stephen Mitchell was born in Lancashire, England, not far from Liverpool, in the sleepy coastal village of Ainsdale, in January 1969. "One of my earliest memories," Mitchell told me over lunch on another cloudless spring day in the storybook-pretty seaside resort of Inchydoney near his home, "has to do with the moon. You know how beautiful the moon is in the morning when it's white, and even the craters are blue, the same blue as the sky? Well, I remember Mum looking up and just saying: 'There are men up there right now, Dave. Right now, there are men walking on the moon.' It's a really cool story if it was '69, but I would have been 6 months old. Must have been a later Apollo mission." Mitchell paused. "Nabokov has this lovely thing in 'Speak Memory,' early memories being like a train going through a mountainous region. There are moments of light, and as you move forward the light gets longer. So that's one of the early, early flashes: 'There are men up there right now.' ” "
- Finally, Kurt Vonnegut and Daniel Pinkwater at the same dinner table. A dream indeed. (Via the fabulous Jenn.)
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