I’m loving these Time Travel posters from 826LA’s Echo Park Time Travel Mart. (via).
Fire Good…But Also Bad
Appearing Elsewhere
My piece in memory of novelist and rapier-tongued pundit Gore Vidal, who died Tuesday, appears on Prospero, the online arts & culture publication of The Economist.
●
●
Fact-Checking Fiasco
What do you think gets fact-checked the most rigorously: newspaper articles, magazine stories, or books? If you guessed books, you’d be surprised to know that they are rarely, if ever, fact-checked. At The Atlantic, Kate Newman questions why we have so much faith in books’ accuracy but why publishers don’t bother.
●
●
Guiding Light
In case you missed it: Google bought Frommer’s last August. Then in April, Google announced that it would stop printing hard-copy guidebooks, so founder Arthur Frommer bought his company back. All of this has led Doug Mack to argue that not only do we need guidebooks, but they should be part of the literary canon. “They also stand out for shaping history, if not always intentionally, because of their authoritative reputation—they have long been the best insight into that which would be otherwise unknown.”
●
●
Books on the Radio
In case you missed it the first time, Tulsa’s KWGS the week re-aired an interview with my co-editor Jeff Martin on our book that came out earlier this year, The Late American Novel.
●
●
Nothing Has to Be Blown Up
“One of the joys of literature is that we can always push back against established ways of speaking and seeing—and nothing has to be blown up.” Mark Z. Danielewski, whose latest novel, the first installment of a 27-book series called The Familiar, has just been released, writes for The Atlantic‘s “By Heart” series about “signiconic” writing, the orneriness of his work and the graphic novel Here. Pair with our 2012 interview with Danielewski.
●
●
But How Many Samples Does it Use?
One good way to spend your Sunday: reading a 7,834-word Atlantic profile of Kanye West. Heck, even Obama’s a fan.
●
●
Zuccotti Park: Day 10
An n+1 writer revisits Zuccotti Park to find Michael Moore reporting for MSNBC on the tenth day of the protest against financial inequity.
●
●