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From Stephen Elliott
What is it like, in post-Tahrir Cairo, to run a bookstore or a publishing house? What is it like to be a reader or a writer?
For Poets & Writers, Stephen Morison, Jr., writes about the Egyptian revolution from a literary angle.
...moreOne of the hardest parts of developing artificial intelligence, writes Frank Bures for Poets & Writers, is trying to teach computers causality: how and why one thing follows from another.
Humans don’t have to be taught:
...moreWe see causality constantly, incessantly, and effortlessly: when we read the news, when we gossip about neighbors, when we watch a movie or read a book….We are constantly cataloguing the story lines around us in an effort to sort out our own.
Who isn’t a devotee of advice from writers about writing? One of my favorite books in this guilty-pleasure genre to come out lately is Dennis O’Driscoll’s collection of witticisms and one-liners, Quote Poet Unquote: Contemporary Quotations on Poets and Poetry.
...morePoets & Writers recently ranked the country’s MFA programs, and as rankings often do, it is being received with some hostility. Their hierarchy of MFA programs is based on the word of mouth of MFA applicants, rather than the US News-style algorithm (which has got its own controversy).
...moreBook reviews sections in newspapers and magazines began shrinking a couple years ago, or being folded into other sections, even disappearing altogether.
In 2007, a band of culturally dedicated authors started the National Book Critics Circle’s Campaign to Save Book Reviewing and now “we remain a nation of passionate readers—even during a time when movies can be streamed on demand and countless distractions are built into every smartphone and tablet.” Nowadays, the number of books published per year is growing.
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Poets & Writers has a new series, Inside Indie Bookstores, by Jeremiah Chamberlin, associate editor of Fiction Writers Review.
Each month, according to Chamberlin, the series will feature an interview with a bookseller, one of many “entrepreneurs who represent the last link in the chain that connects writers with their intended audience.” This month, the spotlight’s on Richard Howorth of Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi.
...moreLast week in my Poetic Lives Online column, I wrote a little about the immediate reaction to the Poets & Writers MFA program rankings. Well, it’s blown up a bit more in the last week, with the Association of Writing Programs weighing in on the matter.
...moreCan you tell the difference between E. E. Cummings and a YouTube commenter? (It’s really not as hard as it looks.)
Caroline Guinzio has been guest blogging at Unstressed this week, and I enjoyed this piece very much in light of the long interview we recently published with Rebecca Wolff.
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