Explaining Philip K. Dick's Exegesis (The Guardian)

The private papers documenting his cosmic illumination by a pink laser have long gilded the PKD legend. Published at last, do they shed much light for the rest of us?

Philip K Dick rewired my brain when I was a mere lad, after I plucked Clans of the Alphane Moon at random from a shelf in my local library. This was in the 1980s: PKD had not yet become a multi-million dollar industry and his best endorsements came from counterculture figures such as Timothy Leary or fellow denizens of the SF ghetto such as Michael Moorcock.

Mr Blair Goes to Kazakhstan (The Spectator)

Ah, Tony Blair — you can’t keep a good hustler down. One minute he’s singing the praises of formaldehyde at the opening of a methanol power plant in Azerbaijan (£90,000 for a 20-minute talk), the next he’s accepting a gig ‘consulting’ in Kazakhstan. For his advice on ‘issues connected with policy and the economy’, he could reportedly make as much as £8 million a year.

In May, Blair and a gang of his associates were spotted at a meeting of the Foreign Investors’ Council in Kazakhstan. Among them was Lord Renwick of Clifton, vice-chairman of JP Morgan, which (coincidently) pays Mr Blair £2 million a year for advice — and Lakshmi Mittal, Britain’s richest man, a generous Labour donor, and the largest employer in Kazakhstan. Blair praised the nation’s ‘wonderful’ achievements.

How things have changed. Ten years ago an authoritarian leader of an ex-Soviet state would get excited if Vanessa Mae came to town. These days, they find that if they toss enough coins and crank up the organ, former leaders of western governments will dance for them like performing monkeys.

Storytelling is a Deadly Business: Krzhizhanovsky's "The Letter Killers' Club" (The Millions)

Anyone who has ever strolled into a Barnes & Noble and felt a certain despair at the sight of all those books lying on tables and shelves, many of them not very good, all of them emitting that silent, deathly scream: please decipher our inky squiggles and bring our stories to life, will identify with the central conceit of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s The Letter Killers Club. Set in Moscow in the 1920s, it features a series of tales told among the members of the mysterious, secretive eponymous organization. Each Saturday, seven individuals known to each other by nonsense sounds instead of names (Rar, Tyd, Zez, etc.) meet in an unfurnished room to spin yarns which they are forbidden to write down. Why? Well, says the group’s president:

Happy New Apocalypse! (Catholic Herald)

With apocalypse fever receiving a boost from all those alleged Mayan prophecies surrounding 2012, Daniel Kalder undertakes a brief survey of the history of Catholics and the End Times.

Exiled to the Isle of Patmos, St. John wrote the Book of Revelation in a state of fevered anticipation. He could hardly have imagined the wildly destabilizing effects his apocalypse would have upon believers over the next two millennia. But that mix of urgency and astonishing imagery is so potent that millions have used both his work and the Book of Daniel as keys to their own times- often with catastrophic results.

Boris Akunin Interview (Publishing Perspectives)

Grigory Chkhartishvili, AKA Boris Akunin, is an international publishing phenomenon. A scholar of Japanese language and culture, and a former literary translator, he wrote his first novel at the age of 40 and in the 13 years since its publication has sold twenty million copies of his books in Russia alone. Daniel Kalder interviewed him for Publishing Perspectives, ahead of his upcoming appearances at the London book Fair 2011.

When I read The White Queen (Akunin’s first book) it was so dense with literary and geographic allusions that I sat with a pocket Moscow atlas in hand so I could follow the hero around the city. Given that your books are so steeped in Russian literature and history, were you surprised when they became successful overseas?

I’ve had no reason to be surprised because my books aren’t all that successful overseas. Maybe because they are so filled with “local color”. Or maybe because they are simply not good enough.

The Wild World of Vladimir Sorokin (Publishing Perspectives)

At the London Book Fair earlier this month, Russia was featured as Guest of Honor. Nearly every Russian writer of distinction was in attendance, save for one: Vladimir Sorokin. It’s no surprise, since anyone who has followed Sorokin’s career knows he has hardly been one to follow the crowd. Yet this weekend, Sorokin will appear twice in New York as part of the 2011 PEN World Voices Festival, first at 4:30 EST in conversation with Keith Gessen and then at 7 p.m. as part of a staged reading with Hungarian film and theater director Kornel Mundruczo. It will be his American debut.

The Secret Afterlife of Roy Orbison (The Dabbler)

For me, like most people, memory is intricately intertwined with music. Another Brick in the Wall pt 2 was a hit the year I started school, and so the song always resurrects those early experiences of classroom tedium. Falco’s Rock Me Amadeus, playing on the ferry that brought me from England to Holland in 1986, summons textures of my first trip abroad from the sinkhole of amnesia; while Kraftwerk’s Radioactivity is forever fused with a 6am walk I took around Amsterdam ‘s Schipol airport. Endlessly and subjectively I can listen to a track and landscapes, people, places and moods return.