The Picador Book Room

“Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things—childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves—that go on slipping , like sand, through our fingers.” ―Salman Rushdie

Happy Birthday, Mr. Rushdie!

Custom bike helmet modeled after Roberto Bolaño’s 2666.

[via: The Paris Review]

nprfreshair:

Two-time winner of the Man Booker prize Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, speaks to Fresh Air about executions, 16th c. England, and feeling close to the past:

 I’m one of these children who grew up at the knee of my grandmother and her elder sister, listening to very old people talk about their memories. And as I say, in their conversation, everything was as if it happened yesterday. And the dead were discussed along with the living, and the difference didn’t really seem to matter. And I suppose this seeped into my viewpoint. Instead of thinking there was a wall between the living and the dead, I thought there was a very thin veil. It was almost as if they’d just gone into the next room.

Image via The Times

Bookmarked: Pages Being Shared in the Picador Office

Meyer’s goal was to make a comic that was equally translatable for sighted and blind people. Using a method similar to Braille, he embossed paper with circles of varying heights and sizes to represent different characters…. “People started creating a love story out of these circles in simple boxes,” he said. “It’s really fascinating.”

Madeline is reading this fascinating piece about a comic book for the blind. 

Although Gabrielle doesn’t eat cheese, she appreciates this giant decoder wheel. 

Emma is reading about Gitmo’s prison library, home to about 18,000 books. ”Books are screened out if they include too much profanity, anti-American or extremist themes, or ‘too much sex and violence,’” the chief librarian at Guantánamo Bay says. Somehow, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo made it through. 

Just created and awesome: OpenDyslexic, a free, open-sourced font that can help people with dyslexia read a book more effectively.

(More info on GalleyCat.)

We agree!

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Insult them like Shakespeare. 

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The writer must be four people:

1. The nut, the obsédé
2. The moron
3. The stylist
4. The critic

1 supplies the material; 2 lets it come out; 3 is taste; 4 is intelligence.

A great writer has all 4 — but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2; they’re most important.

From Susan Sontag’s Reborn: Journals & Notebooks, 1947-1963