Posts by author
M. Rebekah Otto
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The House of Wigs
“The diary of a copywriter, written on company time, billed to the client.” The House of Wigs is a small collection of sixty admirable short stories from the folks at Fireland. This collection renews my faith in what reading will…
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Pimp This Bum
As Amazon, eBay, and the 2008 Presidential election demonstrated, the Internet is a great revenue stream. Well, two guys out of Houston (Sean and Kevin Dolan) decided to harness its power for the benefit of the homeless – at least…
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The Garden of Eden
Pretty quietly back in 1994 archaeologists found huge stone carvings buried in Turkey. About the size of the boulders at Stonehenge, these unique rocks are more than 10,000 year older than those of Stonehenge, dating to about 11-12,000 years ago.…
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Eliza Doolittle in the White House
In her essay “Speaking in Tongues” in The New York Review of Books, February 26, 2009, Zadie Smith examines Barack Obama’s doubleness, not just his biracial genetic history but how he inhabits multiple voices. She reviews his first book Dreams…
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I Hate to Make My Bed
In A Jury of Her Peers, Elaine Showalter chronicles the history of female American writers, from captivity narratives to Annie Proulx. Salon calls her “the woman for the job” due to her 1978 book A Literature of Their Own: British…
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Save the Words
Though once upon a time Noah Webster wrote a dictionary to reflect the ever growing and changing language of American English, the Oxford English Dictionary does regularly update their logs to include such words as “bootylicious” and “MILF” – terms…
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The Last Book Party
So, where is the publishing industry going? No one really knows. But we like to speculate. For the March issue of Harper’s Gideon Lewis-Kraus covered the annual Frankfurt Book Fair, what he called “the last book party.” Read an interview…
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J.G. Ballard’s Pre-posthumous Memoir
After eighteen novels and even more short story collections, J. G. Ballard directly approaches autobiography in his latest book Miracles of Life. (Read the London Guardian review here.) Though known for his dystopian science fiction, Ballard analyzes his own life…
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You Never Knew It Could Be Like This
Koert van Mensvoort is transforming the Internet and the culture around it. A Dutch artist and professor, Mensvoort challenges how we experience the world around us, especially, but not only, the digital world. His Web site asks: “Why not start…
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Reading Online
Fact: The Internet changes how we read. But is reading on the internet not really “reading” at all? In a recent column in The New York Times Virginia Heffernan analyzes how her three year old son “reads” on Starfall, a…
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Private Sector Detention
Last week Pennsylvania judge Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. plead guilty to illegally prosecuting minors, in order to get kickbacks from privately-run juvenile detention centers. Children were sentenced to three months incarceration for making fun of their teachers on MySpace. The judge had…
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More Rules of Writing
In 2001, Elmore Leonard, famous for his crime fiction and suspense thrillers, wrote a spicy essay for The New York Times cataloging his suggestions for good writing, or, rather, he lists what we shouldn’t do. He continues his list of…