Catherine Anyango's graphic novel interpretation of Heart of Darkness
You won’t want to miss today’s news, which features poetry falling from the sky and a graphic novel you wouldn’t expect.
- It’s raining poetry! On Saturday night, 100,000 bookmarks featuring poetry rained down on Berlin from a helicopter. The poetry drop was organized by Chilean art collective Casagrande, which has done five “poetry rains” to promote peace in different regions of the world. This time the bookmarks featured poems by 80 different German and Chilean authors. Jacket Copy has more details, including news of a similar project taking place in Los Angeles.
- Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom released yesterday, and Shelf Life gives a pretty good summary of the recent conversation surrounding it. Shortly after the rave reviews for Freedom started pouring in, contemporary female authors including Jodi Piccoult and Jennifer Weiner raised the question of whether or not a female author in Franzen’s position would receive the same volume of praise. Several newspapers and magazines have chimed in, and it’s definitely a debate worth following.
- If you thought Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness would have been better with some fun pictures, check out the upcoming graphic novel version from artist Catherine Anyango. Okay, maybe the illustrations aren’t “fun,” but Anyango developed a strategy for translating the dense text into graphic novel form: “I tried to make the drawings very rich in detail and texture so that immersive feeling you get, especially when he describes the river and the jungle, was carried across.” The Guardian has more info.
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