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Posts by: Caroline Kangas

The Kindle’s not-so-stealthy attack

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Amazon has been putting out feelers in communities that are doing just fine with out them, thank you very much.

First, Kindle Worlds is Amazon’s attempt to commodify fan fiction starting with Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and The Vampire Diaries but with plans for many more “Worlds.”

And in a more recent, mind-boggling move, Amazon representatives have begun calling independent bookstores with the proposal of selling Kindles in their locations.

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Voyeurism Via Email

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Miranda July’s new project, We Think Alone, sends the personal emails of ten people to your inbox every Monday from July 1 through November 11.

Miranda describes the project:

I’m always trying to get my friends to forward me emails they’ve sent to other people — to their mom, their boyfriend, their agent — the more mundane the better.

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Life through sidelong glances

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Peter Orner‘s first book, Ester Stories, has been re-released with an introduction by Marilynne Robinson.

We’ve come to know Peter’s storytelling mastery through the Lonely Voice column here on The Rumpus. The Chicago Tribune noted themes of “distortion, echo and yet clarity of memory.” And, as Margot Livesey wrote in her review of the book when it first came out in 2001, these are all essential ingredients which tell the story of his “real” subject, “the human spirit in all its vexed yearning.

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The Need for “No”

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For an artist, saying no to anything but the art is strength training for the muscle required to say yes to work, yes to creation.

At Medium, Kevin Ashton tells a story of saying no: “A Hungarian psychology professor once wrote to famous creators asking them to be interviewed for a book he was writing…The professor contacted 275 creative people.

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The Wind-Up [Marathon] Chronicle

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Only once you’ve climbed the steep slope and emerged onto level ground do you begin to feel how much you’ve been hurting up till then.

Haruki Murakami, author of What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, who has run thirty-three marathons in the past thirty years, is “a citizen of the world, who calls himself a runner.” At The New Yorker he shares his thoughts on the process of healing from the recent bombings and his daily tribute to Boston–going for a run.

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“so I took a deep breath and I jumped”

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Roxane Gay isn’t just for adults.

Rookie Mag’s online issue, currently themed “Age of Innocence,” just posted the new(ish — the original was published in Prairie Schooner) beautiful story on teenage love and two different “first” times. So far the teen press can’t stop raving: “This is taking me forever to read because it’s so good I keep pausing so I can save the rest for later.

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“Translation is the art of losses”

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It’s probably no surprise that a group of translators would be masters of language.

Last week, the new Center for Literary Translation was opened in Trinity, Ireland. The Irish Times interviewed a few of the translators there for the event (Hungarian András Imreh, Russian Grigory Kruzhkov, and Italians Anna Ravano and Francesca Romana Paci) and what follows is just lovely.

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Animal Kingdoms

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“Before kittens ruled the Internet, puppies reigned in print.”

Slate provides an in-depth investigation into the classic dog vs. cat battle through competing media. On one hand, the puppy print preference seems to come from getting into the heads of dogs, that they are more approachable as creatures and storytellers.

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Happy Birthday, Marguerite!

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Two Marguerites share this day as their birthday.

Marguerite Duras, who said, “When the past is recaptured by the imagination, breath is put back into life,” was born today in 1914.

Also born today in 1928 was Marguerite Ann Johnson, better known as Maya Angelou.

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Fiction-as-Detroit Conceit

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“[W]hy bother trying to attract Starbucks to Gratiot Ave? Let us brew our own, stronger coffee.”

At The Millions, Alexander Nazaryan makes an optimistic call-to-action for literature and the publishing industry. Rather than trying to make millions (see: auto industry, boomtime Detroit) refocus in on the craft and the reason people flock to literature (see: innovation, community).

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Modern Marginalia

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Two recent innovations for the digital conversation within electronic books.

In his column, One More Thing, Baratunde Thurston proposes:

What if you could download books that had been pre-annotated? I would pay extra to read Freakonomics with commentary by Paul Krugman,The New Jim Crow with notes from editors at The Nation, or the Bible annotated by the creators of South Park.

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A 20th Century Pied Piper of sorts

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Fade in: small, American Midwest Town. Melton Barker walks into town, film kit in tow.

So it went in at least 40 towns across the country, starting in the 1930s and through the 1970s. Barker would enter a town looking for a cast of children for his new movie The Kidnapper’s Foil, offering some screen time — for a small fee, of course.

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