Q. R. Markham‘s heavily plagiarized book Assassin of Secrets somehow made it onto Kirkus Reviews‘ “2011 Best of Fiction” list. (Saved here in case they take it down.) Interestingly, the link doesn’t appear to lead anywhere. (via)
2011 Best of Plagiarism
Ghost Stories and Haunted Histories, as Told by Louise Erdrich
Pulitzer-Prize winning author Louise Erdrich discusses her new novel, The Sentence, a ghost story that handles serious topics with nuance and dark humor.
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Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018)
Ursula K. Le Guin has died at the age of 88, according to the New York Times and Le Guin’s family. The prolific science fiction and fantasy writer — best known for her Earthsea series and The Left Hand of Darkness — explored themes like politics, gender, religion, and environmentalism. However, Le Guin wrote across genre and published over 20 novels, 100 short stories, 7 essay collections, 13 children’s books, 5 volumes of translation, and a writer’s guide. No stranger to awards, Le Guin most recently won the 2017 Hugo Award for Best Related Work for Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016. From our archives: The Millions interview with Le Guin from 2013.
Cormac McCopyEditor
Cormac McCarthy helped copy edit Lawrence M. Krauss’s Quantum Man, a biography of the physicist Richard Feynman. But, seriously, can anyone prove it wasn’t really McCarthy’s Yelp review doppelgänger?
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Let’s Have a Panel About It
Man Booker Prize-winner Marlon James is finished talking about diversity, and here’s part of his logic: “A panel on diversity is like a panel on world peace. It should be seeking a time when we no longer need such panels. It should be a panel actively working towards its own irrelevance. The fact that we’re still having them not only means that we continue to fail, but the false sense of accomplishment in simply having one is deceiving us into thinking that something was tried.”
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The Dark Side of Google
In the near future, Google may use your surrounding sights and sounds to help advertisers target you. Over at Gizmodo, Mat Honan eloquently argues against just this type of thing, and states that “the case against Google is for the first time starting to outweigh the case for it.”
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Russian Slapstick
“Russian humor is to ordinary humor what backwoods fundamentalist poisonous snake handling is to a petting zoo. Russian humor is slapstick, only you actually die.” Ian Frazier writes about the strange humor of Daniil Kharms for the New York Review of Books.
“A quiet hero of contemporary literature”
At The Paris Review, a remembrance of Evan S. Connell, whose work has been cited as an influence by Jonathan Franzen, Lydia Davis and Zadie Smith.
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They also list The Mighty Walzer by Howard Jacobson, which was reprinted this year but was written and first published over a decade ago!