Book briefs: David Foster Wallace film coming this July
Welcome to your weekly roundup of book news and literary highlights from The Thread.
This week, readers can get a sneak peek at the forthcoming David Foster Wallace film and a new trove of unknown fairy tales turns up in Germany
David Foster Wallace on the big screen
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This July, the beloved author, known for his wickedly intelligent fiction and nonfiction, will be portrayed by Jason Segel in the new film "The End of the Tour."
The film is based on David Lipsky's "Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace." In the book, Lipsky recounts his time trailing Wallace across the country on an extended book tour for "Infinite Jest."
A 2010 NPR review called the book "a startlingly sad yet deeply funny postscript to the career of one of the most interesting American writers of all time." It remains to be seen if the magic of Wallace can translate to film, but the trailer is now available online — and the Mall of America makes a cameo.
Flannery O'Connor gets a stamp of approval
The U.S. Postal Service will honor writer Flannery O'Connor with a new postage stamp.
The design was unveiled Tuesday: It features O'Connor flanked by peacock feathers, a nod to her family's farm in Georgia where she raised the birds.
Born in 1925, O'Connor made her name in the Southern Gothic genre. Her dark and humorous stories were steeped with details from her Georgia upbringing. In 1972, "The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor" won the National Book Award for fiction.
Notably, O'Connor's stamp does not feature a quote from the author. This comes after the April release of stamp honoring Maya Angelou, which featured a lovely quote: "A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song." Unfortunately, Angelou never wrote that; the quote was misattributed.
Once upon a time...
...in a land far away, there was a hidden treasure.
As it turns out, that land was Germany and the treasure was an unknown trove of fairy tales, locked in an archive for 150 years.
The fairy tales were collected by historian Franz Xaver von Schonwerth in the mid-1800s — the same time the Grimm brothers were putting together their collection. While the Grimms' stories went to great fame, von Schonwerth's collection fell into obscurity.
Erika Eichenseer, a cultural curator, found the tales while sifting through von Schonwerth's work. They include more than 500 stories that do not appear in other fairytale collections.
You can read one of the rediscovered gems online, courtesy of The Guardian: "The Turnip Princess."