Happy Halloween! At the New Yorker, the winners of the dress your pet as a literary character contest. Don’t miss the honorable mentions (I’m partial to the feline Moby Dick).
Critterati
Twitter Fiction Festival
On Friday Twitter announced their new Twitter Fiction Festival, a “virtual storytelling celebration.” The festival will feature “creative experiments in storytelling from authors around the world,” and you can submit story proposals over here.
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Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been
Sci-fi writers are partly judged on how well they can predict where society is headed. There’s a reason that books with uncannily accurate forecasts of the future capture our interest long after their release. At Salon, William Gibson admits one way in which he got things wrong: he didn’t foresee the rise of social media. You could also read our own Bill Morris on Gibson’s Zero History.
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Miles Klee Gets Interviewed All Over the Place
Ivyland author (and enthusiastic Tumblr-er) Miles Klee was interviewed by Matt Hackett, and a snippet was posted on Tumblr’s new Storyboard blog. If you like what you see, you can get even more from Klee courtesy of his recent Other People Podcast with Brad Listi.
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Just Friends
For over twenty years, from the thirties through the fifties, a group of Oxford writers who called themselves The Inklings met weekly to drink, exchange ideas and read aloud their drafts. Though J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were easily their most famous members, the group had other notable figures, among them the language historian Arthur Owen Barfield. In The Chronicle of Higher Education, a history of the group.
Netflix’s Evolution
In a move that will likely become more and more common, The Weinstein Company has inked a deal with Netflix to license some of its latest (and most critically acclaimed) films to Instant Watch instead of traditional cable outlets. Coriolanus, Undefeated, and The Artist will be among the first titles released. Elsewhere, Vanity Fair profiles Netflix’s “bloody but only slightly bowed” CEO, Reed Hastings.
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A Public Private Experience
“[S]he and her sister should not be affected by the riot. Riots like this were what she read about in newspapers. Riots like this were what happened to other people.” The Guardian runs ‘A Private Experience,’ a short story from Year-in-Reading alum Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
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