Sven Birkerts, still working through arguments begun in The Gutenberg Elegies, suggests in The American Scholar that “the novel and the Internet are opposites.” (via)
The Novel vs. The Net
New Khaled Hosseini Novel Coming in May
This just in: Khaled Hosseini, author of mega-bestseller The Kite Runner will have a new novel out in May, And the Mountains Echoed.
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Stars of Old Russia
In 1913, four years before the Russian Revolution, Tsar Nicholas II made the now-baffling claim that a writer named Teffi was the only major Russian writer. At the time, however, his endorsement made sense, because everybody in Russia, from royalty on down, read Teffi’s work and “delighted” in it. Until the revolution, at which point she was consigned to oblivion. William Grimes writes about a new collection of her stories.
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Digital Textbook Rentals
Amazon is going to start allowing Kindle users to “rent” textbooks. The best part? You can keep your notes after the book is returned.
Basically, Salman Rushdie is the man.
“Writing’s too hard, and most of the time you feel dumb. It’s so difficult, you don’t have time to worry about being famous. That just seems like shit that happens outside.” Cheers to that, Salman Rushdie.
“How like a prison is my cubicle…”
In May, poet David Lehman wrote the first line of a sonnet about cubicle anomie and began crowdsourcing the rest. The completed 12-week project at The American Scholar is not merely a pretty great piece on its own, but a lesson in how to write one, line by line: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8/9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14. You can submit your title suggestion as late as midnight on Sunday, but we suggest getting a start on it now, while the prison of work is still fresh in mind. (h/t The New York Times)
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