Radiohead can typically do no wrong in the eyes of fans and culture pundits, but author Ian Rankin describes how even these indie heroes got him stuck in customer service hell: ” no e-mail address; no phone line; no possibility of human contact.”
Oh No, Computer
Summer Reading, happened so fast.
Now that it’s officially summer, you might find yourself thinking about all of the books you might like to read in the sun. New Directions has a great list (summer of Lispector!), and of course there’s the LARB‘s #OccupyGaddis summer book club.
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Short Stories for your Kindle
Torpedo, the beautifully designed and illustrated Australian fiction quarterly that has featured Jim Shepard, Sheila Heti, Clancy Martin, and yours truly, now becomes the first of its kind to be fully Kindled. Copies are $2.99 here.
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Sounding Off
Shakespeare conspiracy theorists might still wonder who the real playwright was, but we do know what he would’ve sounded like. Linguist David Crystal and his son, actor Ben Crystal, demonstrate the original pronunciation of the Bard’s best. Bonus: An interview with Ben on the research behind the pronunciation.
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Looking Back
The Morning News “gathered writers and thinkers around the world and asked them to sift through the past year of revolutions, deaths, discoveries, and breakthroughs to answer: What was the most important event of 2011?”
Tangled Youths
Evan Hughes investigates the formulation of such writers as Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, and David Foster Wallace. He claims they and their generation “had youths tangled enough for ten novels.”
Capturing Appalachia
“Of all the work produced from this region no one observer gets the place or the people completely right,” Rob Amberg writes about his 40 years spent photographing Appalachia. His photo essay “Up the Creek” is part of The Oxford American’s “Portraying Appalachia” Symposium.
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Do They Get Screeners?
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Craft Work
It’s the kind of niggling question that drives a writer mad: is it best to edit a piece after you finish a draft, or is it better to edit while you write? At Electric Lit, Lincoln Michel argues for the latter, on the grounds that it lets writers fix endemic problems before it’s too late. You could also read Lincoln’s 2010 Millions review of the movie Avatar.
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