Posts by author
Mark Pritchard
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Slow Writing: Archaic Forms of Technology Outlive Newer Ones
We love the image of these young people laboriously but lovingly writing their personal diaries as a way to preserve culture:
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Help Send Ted Rall to Afghanistan
You’re probably familiar with the work of cartoonist Ted Rall, whose work appears on Salon and in many other places. He is raising money for a trip to Afghanistan to report, in his way, on the situation there, and through…
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Woman Whose Bio Resembled Novel’s Character Awarded $100K
A woman who claimed a novelist and former friend based the character of a sexually promiscuous alcoholic on her has won a $100,000 libel award from a Georgia jury. Vicki Stewart claimed that Haywood Smith, a former childhood friend, used…
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“My Worst Mistake? Getting Sick of My Work”
Fiction writer Michelle Wittle got so tired of going over her short story that she just sent the damn thing out, assuming it had no typos. Oops. Of course, this is why you have friends read your stuff just to…
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Van Booy Wins Frank O’Connor Award for Short Story Collection
British writer Simon Van Booy has won “the world’s richest short story prize”, the Frank O’Connor award, for his collection Love Begins in Winter. Van Booy, who lives in New York and is also the author of The Secret Lives…
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World’s most sinister dingbats
While browsing the web during a slow pre-holiday weekend day at work, I stumbled across a font family called Vialog, which is intended to be used primarily in signage. One of the fonts in the family, Vialog Signs Conduct, contains…
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Kerouac: American-French-Latino?
This account of a New York colloquium designed to highlight Jack Kerouac’s Québéqois roots has an odd turn at the end, in which the reporter calls attention to the fact that the confab was part of a series on Latino…
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The Limits of Narrative
In a post on The Guardian (UK), books writer Alison Flood writes about the “Choose Your Own Adventure” series of books and how she would skip ahead to find out whether a prospective choice “led to the treasure in the…
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Why We Need Vampires
In the New York Times today, filmmaker and author Guillermo del Toro and coauthor Chuck Hogan –they have a novel coming out called The Strain — write about how vampires first made it into popular culture early in the 19th…
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Apple’s rumored Tablet: what’s it for?
Rumors of a new device supposedly being prepared by Apple for a release sometime in the next five months are flying this morning after an FT.com story which describes about a flat, rectangular device with which users would interact by…
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Vollmann’s ‘Imperial’ country
William T. Vollmann, the author whose exhaustive research helps to blur the line between fiction and nonfiction, and whose books tend to be measured by the pound, has a new book coming out titled Imperial. The 1300-page tome looks at…