New Believer! October!

Ah yes...another first of the month, another issue of The Believer! That's how it is every month, except when it's the second month of a two-month extravaganza...but I'm getting ahead of myself! This month there's a great piece by Zach Baron on the late Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series of fantasy novels, whose work continues without him...(read the whole thing here and see what I mean)...Wells Tower has an interview with the late great Barry Hannah...David K. O'Hara with a seasonal offering on "autumnal folk," focusing on a U.K. band from the ’70s called Heron that I'd never heard of before...David Fincher interviewed...Ashley Butler on the gas mask...Susan Straight journeys into Inland Empire, CA...Interesting reviews, including Rozalia Jovanovic on Lydia Davis's Madame Bovary translation and Stephen Burt on poet Aaron Kunin...the usual Pendarvis/Hornby/Marcus columnal goodness...wow...a poem by Alan Gilbert!...an interview with legal scholar Marianne Constable (full text here)...and—believe(r) it or not, much, much more!

Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for January 6, 2008

I. Dzyd Dennis on David Fincher:

There is also the matter of his technical virtuosity, which tends to inspire both admiration and suspicion. A teenage apprentice at George Lucas’s effects house, Industrial Light and Magic, and then a hotshot director of commercials and music videos (including a brace of enormously influential ones for Madonna, at the height of her image-making powers), Mr. Fincher has always been in the business of expensive illusion and manufactured beauty. To call him a superficial stylist misses the point; in many of his films the surface is the substance. It is easy to get lost in — and perhaps as a result, to underestimate — the sheer sensory pleasures of his movies: their dynamic compositions and kinetic rhythms, sinuous camera movements and seamless digital wizardry. —NYT

II. The NYT's Education Life features pieces by PTSNBN EdSupp mainstays Rachel and Christine...niiiice....

III. My sources tell me that new New-York Ghosts have been sighted...

IV. The smell is back! (Via Jane)

V. Forthcoming from Knopf—what if it had been about the drink?

APR 1: Three Hundred Tang Poems.
A new translation of a beloved anthology of poems
from the golden age of of Chinese culture.
Edited and translated by Peter Harris.
An Everyman's Library title.
256 pages. $13.50 ISBN 978-0-307-26973-7