BBC
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El-P and Ninja Collaboration “Coming Soon”
A post on Instagram from El-P (@thereallyrealelp) of Run The Jewels with Die Antwoord’s Ninja says only “Coming soon…” which Ninja (@zef_alien) also shared with the caption “EL-P vs NINJA.” Some believe this alludes to a coming collaboration between these two…
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Language: “A Barometer of Society’s Health”
For the BBC, Hephzibah Anderson explores the work of J.R.R. Tolkien and George R.R. Martin, two authors who invented languages to color their fictional worlds. In addition, the article considers how words created by novelists are adopted by contemporary culture: Language,…
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The End of Bouquinistes?
Amazon launched an online bookstore two decades ago. Since then, the Internet has been changing the way readers buy books. Paris has been a major book-selling city since the 17th century, when the first bouquinistes began lining the banks of…
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Rich Writers Get Richer
For most writers, income may be falling, but not for everyone. A new study shows that just as in other industries, income disparity is a growing problem between the writing elite and the rest of us. BBC News reports that just 5%…
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The Best Year in Literature
Hemingway’s In Our Time, Fitzgerald’s the Great Gatsby, and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway were all published in 1925, the year that the BBC’s Culture site has declared the “greatest year for books ever.” The Guardian wonders, though, what other years could…
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Word of the Day: Agacerie
(n.); allurement, enticement, coquetry; flirtation; from the French agacer (“to tease”) Fictional characters – unlike the messy organisms from which they derive – float free from the sordid contingencies of the body, because, no matter how convincingly they’re portrayed as…
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RoboNovelist
Is it conceivable for robots to compete with the “flesh-and-blood novelist?” Over at the BBC, Hephzibah Anderson explores the possibility and the ethical ramifications of algorithms writing the next Anna Karenina. So far, however, Anderson suggests that developers of such technologies have…
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Burnt and Found
[Lowry] spent a decade working on In Ballast to the White Sea, but the draft was lost when his shack near Vancouver in Canada burned down in 1944. However, it has transpired that Lowry had given an early copy to his…
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Notes on Self
At Salon, Laura Miller rebukes Will Self’s criticism of George Orwell at the BBC, arguing that the British novelist has misinterpreted “Politics and the English Language.” She emphasizes the importance that, in his essay, Orwell discussed political writing and did…
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A Million Pound Book
The first printed book in the English language was just sold at auction for £1,082,500. Coming in at 540 years old, The Recuyell of the Histories of Troye revamps Greek mythology idols as chivalric heroes and is considered the crowning…
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Riding On Trains With Pushkin
A city in Siberia is reportedly offering free rides on the underground to people who can recite at least two verses from any poem by Alexander Pushkin, one of Russia’s greatest poets.
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Modern Art in Nazi Germany
This BBC story goes into fascinating detail about the way the degenerate art was displayed alongside insulting graffiti, and, of course, what role Hitler’s youthful art education played in all this. (Via.) In 1937, the Nazi regime staged two simultaneous art…