A pair of pieces from The Millions are among the finalists in this year’s 3 Quarks Daily Arts and Literature Prize: “Her Story Next to His: Beloved and The Odyssey” by Frank Kovarik and “Reading and Race: On Slavery in Fiction” by our staff writer Edan Lepucki.
The Millions Among the Finalists
The Bookseller Turned Spy
Avril Haines, the new deputy director of the CIA, had an interesting career before landing in the Langley. According to a Washington Post report, Haines used to own an independent bookstore in Baltimore, where she “welcomed patrons for the occasional readings of high-toned erotica over chicken tostadas.”
Tuesday Links: Power, ReCaptcha, Junot Diaz
Experience “THE POWER OF BOOKS“You know those annoying puzzles where you type in the letters so the computer knows you’re not a computer creating a fake account or sending spam? A group from Carnegie Mellon is using these “Captchas” to help digitize books. ReCaptcha is a special type of Captcha that displays words that book digitization software is having trouble deciphering. So, by letting the computer know you’re not a computer, you can help some other computers digitize our books.I missed Junot Diaz’s appearance at the Free Library of Philadelphia where he read from his new novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, but Season Evans was there.
The Best Prison Literature
With Guardian reporting that the “Tome Raider,” a Cambridge graduate turned antique book thief, was sentenced for thefts worth £40,000, AbeBooks has put together this list of the best prison literature.
“Dying is totally mainstream.”
Millions staffer Mark O’Connell immersed himself in the “transhumanist” movement for more than a year, checking in on such characters as Zoltan Istvan, the quixotic U.S. presidential candidate perhaps best-known for driving a coffin across the country. O’Connell’s book, To Be a Machine, which details dreamers like Istvan envisioning human existence liberated from the outmoded confines of the human body, publishes this month.
“You’re allowed to laugh.”
A new installment of #LitBeat, in which Steve Almond gives a hilarious and exuberant reading in Moscow, Idaho.