Ever-expanding Amazon is getting in on the app store action with an app store of its own, launching today (and featuring, what else, Angry Birds). Some analysts believe the move presages a plan for Amazon to launch a more fully featured tablet, modeled on the Kindle, but able to play all the movies, music (and now apps) that Amazon now sells in digital form.
Amazon App Store Action
Paul Murray on Epic Fail
“‘There’s no success like failure,’ Bob Dylan once sang – but he couldn’t have envisaged the international notoriety that bad art would achieve in the digital age. Mark O’Connell’s Epic Fail gleefully hops genres and centuries in a quest to understand our obsession with lameness. Clever, profound, bitingly funny, it’s a brilliant analysis from one of the smartest new critics around.” — Paul Murray, author of Skippy Dies
Not These Titles, Please
Looking for the perfect title for your short story / essay / novel / whatever? We wish you the best of luck, and also suggest you don’t pick one of these severely overused options.
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The Epicenter of Pacific Literature
Mike Sonksen takes a look at both Tinfish and Bamboo Ridge Press, as well as a handful of influential Hawaiian writers, as he investigates “Maui, Pacific Literature, and the Aloha Spirit.”
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“We were both crying when I left”
Millions staffer Michael Bourne has new fiction in the latest issue of The Cortland Review, and you can check out his story “San Francisco, Summer 1990” on their website.
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Literature and Commerce
The Rumpus points out that both it and HTML Giant are experimenting with ads. I was also noticing recently that several enterprising literary magazines – including The Paris Review and Canteen have been advertising on Google. (You can buy ads on The Millions too.)
Graphic Pains
Over at Public Books, Jared Gardner explores the theme of pain and illness at the heart of many graphic narratives. As he explains it, “Illness, mental and physical, is arguably comics’ invisible master theme, deeply woven into their genome and shaping the stories they tell, from the earliest newspaper strips (chronic allergies in Winsor McCay’s Little Sammy Sneeze) through the rise of superhero comics (from Batman’s PTSD in 1939 through the Fantastic Four’s radiation poisoning in 1961).” Pair with Paul Morton’s Millions piece on the history of Marvel Comics.
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Six Books in Twenty Years
“Whatever the facts of her life – whether she turned out to be an ancient man living in the Icelandic interior or a woman waiting tables at a Texan diner – Ferrante writes in an autobiographical mode. That is fuel for the truthers, a sort of literary ankle-flashing. But it is also good cover for another motive: a very contemporary form of envy of another’s autonomous space and their creativity, a rage that while they give us their work, they will not also give us their person.” On a new collection of Elena Ferrante’s letters, interviews and short pieces.
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