Posts by author
Kevin Nolan
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George Orwell’s 1940
For more than two years now the Orwell Prize has been blogging George Orwell’s diaries, in real time, seventy years to the day that each entry was originally penned. They are now halfway through their project. The posts begin in…
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Latest on the Digital Public Library of America
“There is great promise in the digital future for libraries,” says John Palfrey, Henry N. Ess III Professor of Law and Vice Dean of Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School, “but we need to work in coordinated fashion…
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Walking Shadows
A “novel without words” captures the turmoil of the working class: public housing, alcoholism, youth violence, adult bitterness, boredom, crime, and drugs.
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Steal This Blog Post
“In a recent New York Magazine article about Frey’s new fiction factory, Frey is quoted saying that documentary is ‘a thesis on truth that hasn’t been proven yet’ and that he ‘should have never fucking apologized’ to Oprah. Many would…
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Strange Powers
It has been eleven years since The Magnetic Fields released the three-album set 69 Love Songs—with its funny-sad, sarcastic, satirical songs about, well, love songs.
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The Digital Public Library of America?
Robert Darnton, historian and the director of the Harvard University Library, has been writing recently about digitized books. Last December, for instance, he suggested the creation of a national digital library as a way to solve the Google Books lawsuit…
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The Unveiled Animal
Joshua Mohr’s second novel returns to the seedy side of San Francisco, where the addicted and the lost search for redemption.
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The Black Minutes
A crime novel set in a fictional Mexican city delves into the unsolved murders of two decades.
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Patti Smith on New York City
Poet, artist, and punk-rock legend Patti Smith sat down last week with journalist Amy Goodman to discuss, among other things, Smith’s memoir Just Kids—reviewed by us in February—about her life and friendship with the late artist Robert Mapplethorpe. Smith was…
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Kevin Nolan: The Last Book I Loved, Short Letter, Long Farewell
Austrian writer Peter Handke begins his 1972 novel Short Letter, Long Farewell with the following: “Jefferson Street is a quiet thoroughfare in Providence. It circles around the business section, changes its name to Norwich Street in the South End, and…
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The Latest on Google Books
“The most ambitious solution would transform Google’s digital database into a truly public library.” “That, of course, would require an act of Congress, one that would make a decisive break with the American habit of determining public issues by private…
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Newspapers in New York: News Is a Verb
If you won’t read a newspaper on a New York City subway, where will you read it? As zeitgeist, as canary in the mine, the habits of New York subway riders signal the end of print newspapers.