Sheree Renee Thomas blogs about the recent tribute to Octavia E. Butler at the New York Public Library.
The evening offered many jewels, too many to jot all down here, ranging from heartfelt testimony, illuminating and hilarious anecdotes, a couple of bizarre moments (oh, we are human, ain’t we!), some fyah performances from Sonia Sanchez and Avery Brooks (Good Lawd!), and rousing musicmakin’ from Toshi and Bernice Johnson Reagon that could only make Octavia smile.
(Illustration by Sukumar Ray, for one of his own books)
I was reading randomly in The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature, and I came across Sukumar Ray, a highly prolific writer of surrealist children’s stories in the 1910s and 20s. He was part of the Presidency College circle of Bengali intellectuals in Calcutta, and he was the father of acclaimed film maker Satyajit Ray.
From Amardeep Singh’s blog, a post on early Bengali science fiction.
It seems a little hard to imagine people writing about electric doorbells and burglar alarms in the 1880s in Calcutta, but there you have it. (Doorbells were actually invented in 1830, so maybe it’s not that shocking.)
