Posts by author
Ian MacAllen
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Indie Bookstores On the Rise
A few years ago it seemed Amazon was about to send independent bookstores the way of Blockbuster Video. Now more than ever though, we’re living in a new Renaissance of independent bookstores. Slate explains why: Independent bookstores never had to answer…
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Cheever House
John Cheever is the quintessential suburban novelist. The New Yorker has the story behind the writer’s Ossining, New York house that inspired many of the stories of middle-class, suburban woe.
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On Death and Ice Cream
Rumpus contributor Julie Morse remembers her father over at The Toast: During the last handful of years of his life my father became one of those unruly cool dads, perhaps exceptionally unruly. My sister and I had no curfews and he…
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Self-Made Man Alive
Rumpus columnist Thomas Page McBee has just released a new memoir, Man Alive. The new book is, in his words, “basically a prequel” to the Self-Made Man column, and attempts to answer the question “what does it really mean to be…
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Automated Authorial Voice
New autocorrect software is beginning to suggest sophisticated word alternatives that go beyond simply correcting typos, reports The New York Times. With such complicated options, the software is beginning to influence authorial voice. This automation also poses a threat to saying…
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Despite Scandals, Facts Still Unchecked
The publishing world has been rocked by numerous high-profile scandals in recent years. James Frey’s memoir turned out to be more of a novel, for instance. Yet despite these mistakes, book publishers are still allowing facts to go unchecked leaving…
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Creating New Words
The act of creating new words helps make language more precise. George Orwell once proposed a ministry responsible for inventing new words for precisely that reason, explains The Airship Daily. However, the shortcomings of language and the new words created…
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From Metaphor to Consciousness
Neuroscientists are examining metaphors and finding that they’re essential to language. Modern brain scanning has allowed scientists to look at brain activity as the brain employs metaphors from language. What has been found is that the brain interprets metaphors literally.…
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Books for the Future
Margaret Atwood’s next book won’t be published for a hundred years. The Future Library project is collecting a hundred manuscripts to be released in the year 2114 with Atwood’s manuscript the first to be added to the collection. Earlier this year,…
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Notable NYC: 9/6–9/12
Saturday 9/6: Sara Majka, Ted Thompson, Justin Taylor, Ingrid Nelson, and Kseniya Melnik join Slice for an evening of emerging fiction. Powerhouse Arena, 7 p.m., free. Stephen Schottenfeld reads Bluff City Pawn (August 2014), a novel about a pawn shop…
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A Floating Library Comes to New York City
NPR reports that floating library pop-up is coming to New York City in the Hudson River. The Floating Library is the work of artist Beatrice Glow and will feature books and chapbooks of underrepresented authors and poets as well as an outdoor reading room. The…
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Writer Reading Grants
Writers often find grants to help them write, but writers also need to read. The Luminaries author Eleanor Catton, last year’s winner of the Man Booker Prize, plans to set money aside to award grants to writers to allow them…