When the villain in Arthur Conan Doyle’s story “ The Adventure of the Dancing Men ” demands to know how Sherlock Holmes could have broken his cipher, the great detective coolly replies, “What one man can invent another can discover.” Read full article > >
See the article here:
Nick Santora’s ‘Fifteen Digits’: A clunky caper
An artist for Aardman film The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists says his success has been accidental.
Continued here:
Pirates artist celebrates success
1 There’s a nip of nonfiction about Rahul Bhattacharya’s The Sly Company of People Who Care (Farrar Straus Giroux, $26). It reads like vintage Granta on speed. Gooroo, the Indian narrator, hunts diamonds, eats deer curry and tells Caribbean tales of such loony specificity that we don’t dare doubt him. (“I returned to the Corentyne, and here to my great regret I missed a grand bank heist by no more than ten minutes.”) Like the No. 72 Sita Sita bus that stops every time a passenger buys a grenade or fish pie, the novel makes accidental detours through Guyana with waggish tricksters, street fighters and barflies. These fist-bumping, teeth-sucking, dread-talking men are matey Rasta philosophizers one minute, thieves and mutilators the next. Guyanese “riddims” of garbled syntax and slang slide over ethnic slurs, scams and general skankiness. The narrator travels with adorable Jankey to Venezuela before their adventure peters out in budget-busting prettification and smuggled cocaine. A soca-soaked picture emerges — kiskadees, whitey trees, married-man pork, rotting wooden houses on stilts, chutney and zinc in the air — all “mud and fruit, race and crime.” Canal-laying, sugar-cane-planting Indian and African slaves and chili-and-brine-whiplashing Dutch masters of the past have given way to gangsters, dictators, corrupt officials and slimy bandit-pandits in “today daynage.” But ganja-smoking, batty-shaking locals still dream big: “They thought they could do anything, turn flimstar, fly fighter jet . . . open casino in Brazil.” For all its pathos, bravado and charm, “This was Guyana. Nobody touch she.” Yeahman. Bhattacharya’s voice is thick with bizarre humor, poetic pidgin and images lush with faraway magic. Read full article > >
Read the original:
3 new novels about modern India
M. Night Shyamalan is returning to the world of “scary science fiction” with an Untitled Science-Fiction Adventure that will reunite Will Smith with his son Jaden for the first time since the two starred in The Pursuit of Happyness (though Will Smith was also a producer on The Karate Kid). We don’t have many details to go on just yet, except that the story is set 1,000 years in the future, and follows a young boy as he roams around an abandoned and scary Earth while he looks for a way to save himself and his estranged father after their ship crashes. The script was written by Shyamalan and Gary Whitta (The Book of Eli), and the premise is definitely intriguing.
