Books as Art
We love books for many reasons. Take a quick break from marveling at the interweb and appreciate the physical book as an object, and as a piece of art.
...morePosts by: Mary Allen
Not Quite Human
For the second time that day, then, I waited in the dark for something not quite human—and all too human—to begin. If you haven’t seen Charlie Kaufman’s new film Anomalisa, we highly recommend that you do. And then after, read this wonderful piece by Zadie Smith on Kaufman, The Polar Express, Schopenhauer, and the uncanny […]
...moreWrit in Water
John Keats died on February 23rd, 1821. The Paris Review muses on the death obsessed poet’s life, and what he cryptically requested be written on his tombstone: Here lies one whose name was writ in water.
...moreTeaching a Robot to Love
Last year physicist Stephen Hawking suggested that advanced artificial intelligence, or AI, could lead to the end of humanity. How are scientists working on this issue? Teaching robots empathy with books! Newsweek reports on the Quixote system, which teaches AI a human sense of right and wrong.
...moreThe Invisible Lower Class
Raymond Carver and other “Kmart realists” championed the working class in high-brow literary fiction. But has the realism of the 99% gone out of style? Electric Literature explores.
...moreHow to Write Something
Keep a close eye on your Twitter account. Important things may be said there that you will be expected to weigh in on, and if you don’t, everyone will wonder if you fell asleep in the bathroom stall of the bar last night and are still there, head sunken low next to the toilet, one […]
...moreAuthors and the Automated
The Believer Logger contributes more insights into the never-ending conversation on the role of technology in our writing. Does it mean demise? Or can authors persist on in the face of an ever more autogenerated world?
...moreThe Autobiographical Novel
Why is it not a memoir, people will ask. I tell more truth in fiction, you might say. Alexander Chee gives step-by-step instructions on how to write an autobiographical novel, and it’s beautiful.
...moreNational Amnesia
Race is an important and central issue in the United States, but what about abroad? It appears that both the United States and the United Kingdom are witnessing one of those moments when we confront what Toni Morrison said in an early interview about Beloved (1987), ‘something that the characters don’t want to remember, I […]
...moreMetaphor in Retrograde
Is your big break finally coming? Will you get that novel finished? Are you about to be struck over the head with a mallet of inspiration? All of these questions answered and more, in your February 2016 writer’s horoscope.
...moreDo You Remember That Thing?
Where do our words go when we lose them? Jenny Diski embarks on an exploration into vanishing vocabulary: So I had a thought about writing a book for the elderly, the old. Those who have lost their words more comprehensively than the friends around our lunch table, but haven’t lost themselves entirely. A book about where all the […]
...moreThat’s Racist
As much as we cherish the books from our childhood, there is no denying that some of the stories are just a little (or a lot) racist. But how do we reconcile this truth? They were the feckless prisoners of their times, and much as we’d like for people in the past to share our enlightenment, […]
...moreWonderfully Witchy
A totally fantastic new comic of literary witches over at Electric Literature. Let your day get a bit magical.
...moreLike Thoreau, But Not
Writers for generation have sought out the solitude of the wilderness to get their work done. But sometimes it’s not as romantic as we hope.
...moreRight on Time
The debate has typically been framed around whether it is ever appropriate for a writer to reference Seinfeld, Bright Eyes, or Facebook. What makes more sense is to talk about whether or not doing so is helpful for the specific project at hand. At Electric Literature, the arguments for and against timeless fiction.
...moreImmortalizing History
Literature continually reminds us that we are not alone and (to paraphrase Kundera) that things are not always as simple as they seem. With so many stories, histories, characters and figures populating a reader’s mind, it’s easy for us to take for granted the liberation that literature imparts. Considering our wide and fast access to […]
...moreBut Is It Dangerous?
Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf has recently become legal to publish and sell in Germany for the first time since World War II. What place does this volume hold in our collective world history? And should it be regarded as a dangerous book? The New Yorker explores.
...moreCan Creativity Be Taught?
Is creativity something we are born with? Can it only be nurtured, or can it be taught? Scientist discuss this age-old question for PRI.
...moreShocking the American Short Story
Three more anthologies published last year suggest that while the [short] story remains one of our most flexible popular literary forms, and the quickest to absorb signals from the culture, if we’re on the verge of another revolution, the shockwaves haven’t registered yet. Or perhaps the short story in America has matured to a point […]
...morePublishing in an Age of Immediacy
As the value of an individual book is devalued, so is the self. We are made to feel that it’s only through constant communication with a community that we have any collective power. How has the immediacy of the Internet changed how we absorb information? What has this done to the manner and number of […]
...more1984 or 2016?
For the Los Angeles Review of Books, Stephen Rohde gives a thorough and chilling analyzation of our current socio-political climate which highlights just how closely our world parallels the one that George Orwell predicted in his novel 1984: No one aware of post-9/11 society in the United States, England, Europe, and elsewhere can fail to […]
...moreShakespeare’s First Folio, Coming to a City Near You!
The Folger has 82 First Folios—the largest collection in the world. It’s located several stairways down, in a rare manuscript vault. To reach them, you first have to get through a fire door … (if a fire did threaten these priceless objects, it would be extinguished not with water—never water near priceless paper—but with a […]
...moreYou Write Like A Girl, Knausgaard
Domestic duties are regarded as feminine in popular culture. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s enormous three volume tome, My Struggle, is full of descriptions of domesticity, and he has been showered with highbrow literary praise for them. But would the same be true if he were a woman? What if it were a woman moaning about motherhood […]
...moreAn Argument Against Spinelessness
Considering the other forces vying to demarcate our time, dividing it up between mass shootings and other traumas, to encounter a packed bookshelf, a library, or a bookstore with a breathtaking procession of spines and all the potential therein—it is a relief to know that time can also look like that, that it could contain […]
...moreThe Keeper of Weirdness
Our love of libraries is nothing new, but there are a particular breed of libraries less discussed—the college library. Book Riot has written a love letter to collegiate libraries and all the weirdness that lives there.
...moreWelcome to the Future of Reading
Wally Lamb’s forthcoming novel is being published exclusively as an app. Yes, you read that correctly. More on Electric Literature.
...moreIs Writing Art or Profession?
For those who start within the establishment, professional writing is likely to correspond to drudgery, and they’ll seek to escape it. For those on the outside looking in, it’s a mark of legitimacy. The reasons behind why writers write is arguably broken into two camps: for art and as a profession. Certainly neither is more […]
...moreA Novel’s Worth in Gold
Can Haruki Murakami write a financially unsuccessful novel at this point in his career? What would it take for him, or a writer with a similar sales history, to fail to sell? And what does this tell us about the novels we continue to publish? The New York Review of Books digs in.
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