It has been a busy few weeks! Face with Tears of Joy was published back on the 1st of July in the US and on the 17th everywhere else. I’ve been lucky enough to talk and write about the book in a number of different venues, and for the book itself to be reviewed in a variety of places. Here’s a quick round-up of it all.
First up was a chat with Roman Mars on 99% Invisible, one of my favourite podcasts, in this wider episode on emoji and the law. (That makes it four interviews for four books on 99PI, which is, frankly, ridiculous. I’m just some guy writing a blog, you know?) I also enjoyed talking to Mignon Fogarty, or Grammar Girl, and with Mike Carruthers of Something You Should Know.
On the radio, I appeared on the BBC’s Today programme with Susie Dent of Countdown fame, and on Radio Scotland’s Drivetime. Both items start at around five minutes before the end of each programme; it turns out that the history of emoji is the ideal “…and finally” item for otherwise serious radio shows. That said, the hosts of Radio New Zealand’s Saturday Morning programme were happy to discuss emoji with me for a solid twenty-five minutes, so at least some national radio networks know where it’s at. Are you hearing me, BBC?
The book has been quite widely (and positively) reviewed this time around: I counted reviews in the Guardian, the Telegraph, the Wall Street Journal, New Scientist, Literary Review, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly and Kirkus.
I added a little to the general noise myself. Longreads published an extract from the book on the subject of emoji as language; Barnes & Noble asked me to write about how I wrote the book; and Keith Broni of Emojipedia and I had a lengthy chat which he turned into a sort of whistle-stop tour of emoji history. My publisher, W. W. Norton, published a short emoji quiz that I put together for World Emoji Day. Here at the blog, I published the Shady Characters Periodic Table of Emoji and, more recently, an investigation of whether emoji follow Zipf’s Law, a striking but perplexing principle that defines how often one might expect to see a given word — or emoji! — in a body of text.
And that, I think, is that. If you read the book, whether you happened to buy, borrow or steal it, I hope you enjoy it!