In Sydney, everyone runs. Actually everyone. We didn’t walk a block that first day without seeing someone running. …more

There was a paper American flag taped to the door, and a panel missing by the knob, and so when no one answered, we let ourselves in.

Fixed gear bikes lined the hallway and in the living room cigarette smoke settled on the thrift store couches. Three boys, not a colored piece of clothing between the lot of them, raised their beers at we entered. …more

From a tiff that begun on Twitter to the calling out of the New York Times Book Review, literary circles are questioning the how gender affects not just authorship, but how it may change the very genre of a given book.

New statistics (crunched by the Double X staff) show a gender imbalance in books considered by the NYT (and other elite publications), but the question of where to lay the blame of sexism remains unclear: is it the taste of the average American reader (gauged best by the average stack of books at Costco), the publishing industry, or the critics themselves that create the male majority in the world of literary criticism? Or are men, as they ever have, simply writing more books than women? Ruth Franklin explores the questions and more in her article, “Franzen Fallout.”

Although adult resource centers are nothing new, The Thrive project (based in rural Massachusetts) is taking another look at how these centers function, and what exactly they function for.

Thrive encourages adults to not simply live life, but enjoy and explore it, offering “a chance to live better and participate more; to thrive instead of just survive.” Along with traditional resources like computers and resume help, Thrive provides chances at internships, apprenticeships, and even space for making art. It’s local, community based, and available for adults to change their day-to-day grind into something that grinds a little less.

Cruising along the information super highway, fashion often dictates that the faster, the sleeker, and the more high-tech the better. And so it’s nice to know the somewhere the interwebs someone has dedicated a small patch of real-estate to the beginnings of the Digital Age.

Yes, it’s that time already; some computers (one’s you might not even remember) are finally retro. Jason Bitner explores our first encounters with these machines through photographs and essays; learn more about the project here, including how to submit your own bit (or eight bits…) of technological nostalgia.

Ever think that your day-to-day hum drum simply isn’t productive enough? Do you feel bogged down by a sense of overall disappointment or lethargy?

Well we’ve got answers for you! In her latest project, our own Rozalia Jovanovic gave out five simple, everyday tasks to twenty four participants – writers, artists, musicians, etc. Using a pseudonym, these participants reported back on their tasks via postcard, each response different and unique, resulting in the project promising to deliver you out of the Doldroms: “Manual for a Productive Everyday Life.”

As the iPad hits the million mark for its first month of sales, David Carnoy looks back at Apple’s first portable product, the iPod, and the similar paths the two may take in the world of copyright piracy.

Carnoy doesn’t argue that music piracy originated with the iPod, but rather that the release of the product marked the proverbial shot of adrenaline in the heart of illegal filesharing. With the release of the iPad, Corney predicts a similar fate for ebooks, as well as good old fashion paper book sales. Will the iPad fuel pirates of the written world into greater and greater numbers? Perhaps, especially with pillaging only a touchscreen away.

Literary magazines, once the backbone, the pulse, and other anatomically analogous words of the American fiction world, have taken a hit in subscriptions in recent decades. Does this mean the death of fiction as we know it, or simply a critical-condition status?

Jay Baron Nicavo muses through the possible culprits of the current climate, from MFA students to power-hungry editors. In the end, he boils it down to a sort of corporate group-think mentality on the part of editors, as they scramble to find the “next big hit.” Like the movie industry, marketable fiction has succumbed to the lilting seduction of the blockbuster, and oh, what a dollar-hungry demon it is.

Over the decades, the world has upgraded from iron cast printing press to ink jet printers, and yet the complexities of publishing have recently shifted from the how to the how many in terms of the different mediums a single book can embody.

Between hardcover, paperback, iTunes, and e-readers, each new literary hit has to be re-priced, re-marketed, and re-sold. And yet amongst the chaos of the industry, it sees that the fortunes of devoted readers have never looked better. Not only are e-readers and iTunes-style books developing a craft and aesthetic all their own, but a book has never come at a better value, or at a more accessible location. The result? The American readership is increasing, and that’s always good news.

Bummed about shelling out for printer cartridge after printer cartridge? Tired of submitting essays and papers, only to find that the breaking of your bank outweighs the heartbreak of oh so many rejection letters? Well the University of Wisconsin has the answer for you.

Turns out there might be more to font choices than just aesthetics; type faces such as Century Gothic and Times New Roman use about 30% less ink than say, Arial (as do most serif — as opposed to sans serif — font varieties). The hitch, however, is that a thinner font is a wider font, which means less words per page and more pages per words… and thus it comes to the ever-too common choice: the environment, or your pocketbook?

Shakespeare is the classic and timeless example of dramatic excellence, and once again in this modern age it is being put to the test.

In a five week real-time performance, ‘ol Bill’s Romeo and Juliet is going to be played out over Twitter, with each character represented by a username. They will tweet back and forth, following a set list of things that are deemed necessary (by the plot of the original) to happen over that particular day or week, as well as interact with followers and and improvise amongst themselves. It really is Shakespeare as you’ve never seen it, or tweeted it, before.

Update: It should be mentioned that this reminds us of McSweeney’s “Hamlet (Facebook Newsfeed Edition),” albeit on a much larger and more interactive scale.

With publishers delaying e-book releases to encourage hardcover, real-book sales, what is the new and hip Kindle consumer to do?

What if you buy the hardcover, and then pirate an early electronic copy for free? Are publishing companies single handedly conspiring with the likes of Stephen King to destroy the planets forests? Or are they simply employing a new marketing tactic, called “windowing,” which the conscientious consumer should abide and respect?

The New York Times’ ethics column answers these questions and more, exploring with ample sarcasm topics from the plight of the planet’s resources to clocking work hours over gin and tonics. So… ethical or not? The internets may never know.

In a truly modern media scandal, Tommaso Debenedetti (of the esteemed Italian Debenedetti) literary family has been publishing fake interviews in Il Piccolo magazine with the likes of Phillip Roth, John Grisham, and Gore Vidal.

Contacting many of Debenedetti’s subjects from years past (over half of which are Nobel Laureates), Judith Thurman reports that every subject has denied, in some way, the supposed interviews, or in some cases any contact with Debenedetti at all.

Learn more.

Type the name “Jack Matthews” into Wikipedia and it will take you to the profile of a Welsh rugby player, now retired.

The Jack Matthews recently interviewed on TeleRead, however, has never seen the underside of a scrum. He’s an author of over twenty published novels and short story collections and, at the age 84, is still teaching young minds how to think and how to write (although he has significant questions as to if that last one’s really possible). …more

Clichés are, by definition, old hat, but what if there’s a subtler version of the oh-so-enticing little literary buggers?

Blogging for the Guardian, Peter Robbins pontificates on his own personal clichés, and how (although they may not realize it), many writers tend to develop fallbacks of vocabulary that are uniquely, their own. This can lead, Robbins muses, to a body of work by a single author that is dangerously riddled with self-made clichés. How to avoid this vicious, repetitious cycle? A simple suggestion: get a really, really good editor.

In light of the recent Orange Prize short list, Jojo Moyes ruminates on the split themes of modern women’s fiction. Somewhat dark, serious subject matter such as Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible seems to dominate the field of formal literary honors, whereas fiction with a more upbeat slant and (how dare they!) the occasional happy ending gains far more popular support.

From Chinese foot binding to what, exactly, we mean by “women’s fiction,” Moyes explores the conflicts within the genre and what, if anything, women writers should do about it.

Sara Faye Lieber’s essay “Bohemian Rhapsody” begins with a meditation on sleep, a most basic and necessary human activity, and goes on to describe how her own becomes impeded by an infestation of bedbugs.

With the critters steadily on the rise since the seventies, Lieber relates a striking and personal account of her experience, drawing unique parallels between the consequences of the bugs and her labor as an archive worker, digitizing (and seemingly minimizing) countless decades of encyclopedic information.

Forced to choose the most cherished of her possessions and trash the rest, Lieber ponders the value of information, its organization, and what, in the age where precious little is still precious, we would choose to save. Read it here.

With the days of frantically clicking away pop ups behind us, ad-blocking software may seem like the perfect way to view your favorite sites in peace. And yet, as Ken Fisher explains, this software may be hurting your favorite blogs, new sites, and other interweb ventures.

Because advertisements pay the sites they use on a per-view basis, patrons running the software are actually denying more and more funding to sites they visit most. Fisher puts a plea out to the internet at large, asking visitors to ditch the software and tolerate the flashing banners and i-pod contest scams (or, god forbid, one could subscribe for an ad-free experience). For the good of the internet; for the good of the sites we all love and cherish.

As the term “self-publishing”  became more common in the vernacular, the prospect of DIY literature was seen as godsend, bridging the gap between writer and reader, creating a corporate publisher-free utopia. And yet in her article “Self-Publishing, Author Services Open Floodgates for Writers,” Carla King asserts that ever-more common practice may not deliver all we’ve thought it would promise.

When everything from cover design to boxes of neatly packaged books become as easy as the click of a mouse (and the emptying of a bank account), King contemplates whether this market, so praised in it’s beginning, may be loosing it’s rose-colored sheen.

Digitized books, whether they be in kindle form or otherwise, are more than just a fad, and although Google Books is growing by the day, many authors have recently chosen to opt-out of Google’s ever-expanding digital library. The dissenting authors have grown since the issue with Google arose, now tallying some 6,500, including Thomas Pynchon, Zadie Smith, Phillip Pullman, Bret Easton Ellis, James Frey, and Michael Chabon. And although the immediate reasons for their choice may seem purely financial (digitized works may hurt sales), authors instead discuss the philosophical nature of copywrite:

“It seems they plan, unilaterally, to take ownership away from the writer, and the ownership doesn’t pass to the readers (fat chance!) but to a giant profit-making corporation. A vast entity allegedly intent on ‘doing nothing evil’ has simply decided this will be so…” – Gwythen Jones

Even in the face of digital media takeover the sentiment of ownership, of giving credit where credit is due, carries on.

An old professor from college writes me and asks for my snail mail address. It isn’t such a strange request – we have developed a kind of friendship since I graduated. I babysit his daughter on occasion; we meet at the corner store for coffee when we can both find time, which is almost never.

A week later a package arrives at my mother’s house, where I am staying for a month to sort some things out. The package is addressed in my professor’s handwriting, and inside is Nick Flynn’s The Ticking Is the Bomb. The book is yellow, with a silver and blue graphic on the paperback cover, drooping in my hand as I hold it, standing in the middle of my mother’s hallway. …more