Vita
James Elkins grew up in Ithaca, New York, separated from Cornell University by a quarter-mile of woods once owned by the naturalist Laurence Palmer. He stayed on in Ithaca long enough to get the BA degree (in English and Art History), with summer hitchhiking trips to Alaska, Mexico, Guatemala, the Caribbean, and Columbia. For the […]
The novel
These days I am concentrating on a work in progress—an experimental novel called Five Strange Languages. It’s long and complex: it has photographs, footnotes, multiple columns, graphs, charts, equations, and sheet music. I have been working on it more or less every day since 2008. It’s divided into five volumes. Book 3, Weak in Comparison […]