Appearing Elsewhere

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)

Led by Millions Top Tenner The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, dystopia is unseating vampires as the dominant theme in teen fiction, according to The Independent. The paper lists several other examples of the hot new trend, including Plague by Michael Grant and Matched by Ally Condie. (We’d argue that with dystopian classics like 1984 and Lord of the Flies on teen reading lists for decades, this is an old trend that’s new again.)

Google has just released a tool that lets you see how frequently certain words have appeared in the millions of books from all eras that Google has scanned. It’s pretty neat. Here are some presidents, technologies, and the meaning of life.

National Book Award-Winning author of The Echo Maker Richard Powers has a new story out, “Genie“, as an ebook original.

Check out a new essay from Zadie Smith in NYRB on the uncanny, Schopenhauer, and Anomalisa. “That we believe ourselves to be separate from each other, and separate from the apparent objects of our desire, was, for Schopenhauer, the root of our suffering.” For more on Smith, read our review of NW.