Pen­guin have reis­sued Kurt Von­negut’s cold war clas­sic Cat’s Cra­dle. If you haven’t read it, then now’s your chance. Ben­jamin Kunkel’s new intro­duc­tion is online at the Guardian. Here’s a taster:

“It is a fun­ny and despair­ing vision of the last judg­ment done in com­ic-book style, and Von­negut’s mod­esty as an artist com­bines with his dis­may as a man to pre­vent him from lav­ish­ing too much care­ful por­trai­ture on peo­ple not long for a world that’s about to crack up any­way. It arrives like the punch line to one of Von­negut’s jokes when you realise that the most real­is­tic fea­ture of Cat’s Cra­dle is the idea of a tech­nol­o­gy capa­ble of destroy­ing civil­i­sa­tion in a day.”

Also in the Guardian this week­end are two of my reviews of new non-fic­tion paper­backs that are well worth read­ing too: When Life Near­ly Died: The Great­est Mass Extinc­tion of All Time, by Michael J Ben­ton; and Mind, Life and Uni­verse: Con­ver­sa­tions with Great Sci­en­tists of our Time, edit­ed by Lynn Mar­gulis and Eduar­do Pun­set. The lat­ter offers a won­der­ful anti­dote to night­mares of mad sci­en­tists cre­at­ing ice-nine type super­weapons… You can read them here.

A cou­ple of oth­er links that have caught my eye. An intrigu­ing piece in The Amer­i­can Schol­ar by Bri­an Boyd — biog­ra­ph­er of Nabokov — on “The Art of Lit­er­a­ture and the Sci­ence of Lit­er­a­ture”.

And an amus­ing piece on how writ­ers write:

“Vir­ginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw and Roald Dahl did it in sheds at the bot­tom of the gar­den. Shaw’s desk was famous­ly on cas­tors, so he could turn it through­out the day to get max­i­mum light. Dahl even had one of his own hip bones sit­ting on the desk. Every writer will have their own rit­u­al.”

So what are your “Writu­als”?