Posts by author
Sam Riley
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Fictionalizing Gadhafi
After decades of unlimited wealth and power, Gadhafi’s on the run. Such a steep decline from rich to running can only incite the imagination. Salon.com got a slew of authors to imagine the intricacies of Gadhafi’s current reality. Steve Almond…
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Murakami Comin Your Way
Haruki Murakami discusses “Town of Cats,” an excerpt of his impending publication, 1Q84 (to be released in October) with the New Yorker’s fiction editor. More reason to get excited for fall’s literary bounty! “Whenever I write a novel, I have…
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Listen to Faulkner Read
William Faulkner secured the first Writers-in-Residence position at UVA and held the position for two terms. This site has sonically preserved Faulkner’s residency in the form of these recordings. He held readings, gave a couple addresses and answered questions from…
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Anarchy and Amazon Have Something in Common
The 17th century Guy Fawkes-inspired mask has become the symbol of anarchist protesting, made widely recognizable in the states from the movie V for Vendetta. More recently it became the face of infamous hacker group, Anonymous. Unfortunately, sporting this mask…
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Questioning Truth in Photos
Errol Morris, the truth-seeker/director of the documentary The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War is once again having us question the facts. His collection of essays, Believing is Seeing (Observations on the Mysteries of Photography) considers our undiscerning…
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Inauspicious News For Our Economy
The whole system of American outsourcing has rendered our industry incapable of producing the next technological innovation, which unfortunately is the key to reconstructing our economy. One example of this is the Kindle. Amazon doesn’t have the means for the…
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Finland’s Got Education Down
This article is a gem from a recent Longreads selection, on the subject of education. Finland’s got an optimally functioning educational system, one that America can learn a thing or two from. Its success is due to its “whatever it…
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Pollock on Film
Ever wonder what creating abstract expressionist art looks like? This documentary, made one summer way back in 1950 by Hans Namuth, follows Jackson Pollock in his studio. “Above, you can watch the result of Namuth’s second effort. The ten-minute film,…
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Blade Runner Take Two
Blade Runner is making a comeback. It was twenty-nine years ago that Ridley Scott directed the awesome dystopian sci-fi film, based on the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Now he is making either a prequel…
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Nash and the “Shitiffication of the Book”
Matt Runkle interviews Richard Nash for the Boston Review, who ran Soft Skull Press for eight years. Now he’s heading two other publishing ventures, Cursor (an online literary community where writers can post/discuss manuscripts) and their first imprint, Red Lemonade.…
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Wendell Pierce on the Help
After we published Roxane Gay’s essay on the Help last week, it launched a major discussion not only about the shortcomings of the movie and the book, but on how pop culture negotiates and regenerates historical movements, tired slave narratives,…