Graphic designer Jason Huff takes the one hundred most downloaded copyright-free books and reduces them (pdf) using Microsoft Word 2008’s AutoSummarize 10-sentence function. Book Bench highlights several of the absurd – if occasionally poetic – results.
AutoSummarizing the Classics
I’m With the Ogres
There’s a tiff going on between Ursula le Guin and Kazuo Ishiguro. After le Guin accused Ishiguro of “despising” the fantasy genre, following an interview with the Times in which he wondered aloud if his readers would be prejudiced against his latest book, Ishiguro defended himself, claiming that he is “firmly on the side of the ogres and the pixies.” You can read a full rundown in The Guardian.
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The Lonesome Death of Lit-Fic
Guernica picks a scuffle with the VQR‘s Ted Genoways over what’s killing literary fiction. (Writers? Editors? M.F.A.s? How about late capitalism? Or the term “literary fiction?” Or the surfeit of articles about its demise?)
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After the Dawn
In 1958, the Indian writer Yashpal published the first installment of This Is Not that Dawn, an eleven-hundred-page novel and feminist epic written in Hindi. The book presages many of the biggest controversies affecting India today. At Page-Turner, Karan Mahajan reads the novel, explaining why he believes it to be “the greatest long novel about India.” Related: Mythilo G. Rao pays a visit to the Jaipur Literature Festival.
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The Church of Scientology vs. The New Yorker
Last February, everyone was talking about Lawrence Wright‘s epic New Yorker profile of Paul Haggis and The Church of Scientology. But now, as The New York Times reports, the Church has released Freedom, a 51-page retaliatory glossy with DVD accompaniment.
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Contemporary Arabic Novels
Claudia Roth Pierpont writes about the contemporary Arabic novel in this week’s New Yorker, highlighting Iraqi, Palestinian, and Egyptian examples.
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Jay Gatsby, Iconic American
BBC‘s Tom Geoghegan asks whether or not The Great Gatsby is “the perfect tale for modern America.”
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