Weekend Content

A piece of short fiction from Tranquility author Attila Bartis is available in English at Hungarian Quarterly

Madrid’s Prado museum becomes the first one that you can tour with Google Earth.

An interview with one of Penguin Classics’ designers:

Please elaborate on your process of gathering typographical inspiration for the Boys Own Books series.

CBS: I spent a lot of time in the London Library printing and typography section. It’s a great place. It was there that I re-kindled my love of Nicolete Gray, one of the few female typographers in the history books that I was aware of when I was a student. I spent a lot of time putting together research of type from the periods when each book was published. It was like being a student again, but in a real working situation, which was excellent.
The idea was to have period-appropriate type on each title without restricting myself to books as inspiration. The Man Who Was Thursday, for example, takes its cue from Dada and Futurist typography, which fits both the early 20th-century setting and the anarchist subject matter, but wasn’t a feature of mainstream publishing design at the time.

The NEA’s Reading on the Rise

Kafka’s "porn stash": not really that big or pornographic

An anthology of radical children’s literature

The Satanic Verses at 20

How one book ignited a culture war:

Four days after Rushdie received his "unfunny Valentine", he issued an apology: "I profoundly regret the distress that publication has occasioned to sincere followers of Islam." At first the apology was rejected then accepted in Iran, before Khomeini stated that even if Rushdie repented and "became the most pious man of all time" it was still incumbent on every Muslim to "employ everything he has got" to kill him. So much for the spirit of forgiveness.

Hushed into Silence:

The Satanic Verses was, Salman Rushdie said in an interview before publication, a novel about ‘migration, metamorphosis, divided selves, love, death’. It was also a satire on Islam, ‘a serious attempt’, in his words, ‘to write about religion and revelation from the point of view of a secular person’. For some that was unacceptable, turning the novel into ‘an inferior piece of hate literature’ as the British Muslim philosopher Shabbir Akhtar put it.

Assassins of the Mind:

Not everybody agreed with me about the nature of this confrontation. President George H. W. Bush, asked for a comment, said that no American interest was involved. I doubt he would have said this if the chairman of Texaco had been hit by a fatwa, but even if Salman’s wife of the time (who had to go with him into hiding) had not been an American, it could be argued that the United States has an interest in opposing state-sponsored terrorism against novelists. Various intellectualoids, from John Berger on the left to Norman Podhoretz on the right, argued that Rushdie got what he deserved for insulting a great religion. (Like the Ayatollah Khomeini, they had not put themselves to the trouble of reading the novel, in which the only passage that can possibly be complained of occurs in the course of a nightmare suffered by a madman.) Some of this was a hasty bribe paid to the crude enforcer of fear: if Susan Sontag had not been the president of pen in 1989, there might have been many who joined Arthur Miller in his initial panicky refusal to sign a protest against the ayatollah’s invocation of Murder Incorporated.

El Pais:

En España también se experimentó el miedo provocado por los desafueros de la "identidad islámica ofendida". En Seix Barral -que había obtenido los derechos de Los versos satánicos pujando más alto que Alfaguara en la subasta abierta por su agente- estaban aterrorizados, empezando por mi admirado Gimferrer. Y, de hecho, el libro no fue publicado hasta mayo de 1991 y en una traducción (mejorable, dicho sea de paso) cuyo autor (de quien se afirmaba que había huido a América) se ocultaba bajo el seudónimo de "J. L. Miranda". Veinte años después de todo aquello, la libertad de expresión se encuentra en las democracias occidentales en peor situación que en los ochenta: los intolerantes están a la que salta y han logrado que los que no lo son elaboren una demasiado prolija lista de excepciones "políticamente correctas" a una norma conseguida con sangre y revoluciones "políticamente incorrectas".

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