Bill Cheng's Blog, page 20
September 23, 2014
And here’s the lovely Claire Messud talking on The...
And here’s the lovely Claire Messud talking on The Loser:
The greatness of a great book is untranslatable. I cannot tell you what is extraordinary about The Loser. You must read it for yourself. You will not find it pleasant. You may not find that it speaks to you with the immediacy and the insistence that it speaks to me. But you will certainly find that it speaks searingly, fearlessly and comically.
What more do you want? Come out to Hunter College tomorrow night and see Shawn and Eisenberg tear it up!
September 21, 2014
yeahwriters:
laviebelem:
Highlights from this year’s...
Highlights from this year’s brooklynbookfestival, including a hilarious talk with Bob Saget and John Leguizamo. Oh and the totes! It was very difficult to not add to my ever-growing tote collection, not to mention my book collection too.
Man what a good day!
"Publishers are like, ‘We don’t know who your market is, we don’t know who we’d sell your book to,’..."
- Roxane Gay, talking about writers of color at the “This Woman’s Work” panel at the 2014 Brooklyn Book Festival (via yeahwriters)
September 19, 2014
The Brooklyn Book Festival is this weekend!
Be sure to come out on Sunday to check out some panels and stop by the Strand booth (#901). The Brooklyn Book Festival is free, and takes place outside (and the weather forecast looks great).
Paul Auster, Zadie Smith, Roxane Gay, Jenny Offil, Catherine Lacey, Waldo (yes,
September 18, 2014
September 13, 2014
From Deborah Eisenberg’s Paris Review interview:
You...
From Deborah Eisenberg’s Paris Review interview:
You know, we’ve been sitting here, using this word politics—but what do we mean by it? Let’s say we mean social mechanisms, and systems of social mechanisms, that sort out who gets treated how. Well, every writer— everybody—has implicit views of the way people are related to one another through such systems. And those views are inevitably going to be expressed in a piece of fiction.
[…]
Fiction is an excellent way to explore the relationships between people and their contexts. But any real exploration of those relationships is not going to be at all doctrinaire. It’s not the purpose or practice of fiction writers to polemicize. On the contrary, fiction might be the most unfettered way to go excavating for evidence of real human behavior and feeling. And if you keep your hands off them, your characters are bound to demonstrate the workings of the world in ways that take you by surprise.
Eisenberg and Wallace Shawn are going to be at Hunter College on September 24th, doing a reading of Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser.
September 12, 2014
jstor:
On this day in 1940, a group of school boys discovered...
On this day in 1940, a group of school boys discovered the Lascaux cave paintings in France. Read a very cool account of the discovery in a 1941 issue of The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland.
September 11, 2014
Wallace Shawn in My Dinner with Andre. Shawn and Deborah...
Wallace Shawn in My Dinner with Andre. Shawn and Deborah Eisenberg will be at @hunter_college on Sept. 24th!
PC Gamer on the Mojang’s rumored sale to...
PC Gamer on the Mojang’s rumored sale to Microsoft:
Minecraft’s biggest contribution to PC gaming isn’t that it helped to revive sandbox survival games or that it popularized the “paid pre-release” model now formalized in categories like Early Access. Minecraft’s most significant impact on our platform is being the formative experience for a generation of young PC gamers.
…
In a period where millions of kids are gaming on ubiquitous, versatile, and relatively inexpensive phones (where they can also play a narrower version of Minecraft, of course) Minecraft presents a compelling contrast: a malleable, endless world on a big screen where you can socialize with friends, build anything, change the game to suit your playing style, and literally create your own rules.
