At HTMLGIANT, Roxane Gay gets down to the details of everything she’s learned about the challenges and pitfalls, much of it shipping-related, of running a micropress. Essential reading for those dreaming of starting a small press one day.
Hell on Mail
Vermeer was a Hacker
"The way Vermeer painted this wall is consistent with a photograph. It is not consistent with human vision." In a fascinating new documentary by Penn and Teller, a digital-graphics artist spent five years building a lens, a room, and a harpsichord to figure out how.
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Get Shorty
Want your writing to have punch? Want your readers to believe you? "The five-word sentence as the gospel truth...Express your most powerful thought in the shortest sentence," Roy Peter Clark writes in The New York Times. Sorry that every sentence in this post is more than five words.
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A Great Career
Back in May, our own Sonya Chung reviewed All That Is, the first novel in 35 years by A Sport and a Pastime author James Salter. For another viewpoint (courtesy of the LRB), check out James Meek's assessment of the book alongside Salter's Collected Stories.
Who You Calling “Late,” Buddy?
Behold the launch of Bloom, a fabulous new website (founded by our own Sonya Chung) that pays attention to older writers who meet her definition of “Late Bloomers.” (In case you’re wondering, the site spun off from our own Post-40 Bloomers series).
Hail to the Chief (Librarian)
During the riots in Baltimore following Freddie Gray's death, the city's chief librarian insisted her neighborhood branch remain open. Yesterday that librarian, Dr. Carla D. Hayden, was sworn in as the 14th librarian of Congress, the first woman and African-American to hold the position. We wonder what Dr. Hayden might make of our own Jacob Lambert's "Open Letter to the Person Who Wiped Boogers on My Library Book."
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Tale of a Stalker, Ctd.
Not long after James Lasdun released his new book, Give Me Everything You Have, Jessica Freeman-Slade reviewed it for The Millions. Now, in the latest issue of the LRB, Nick Richardson offers his own take. (You could also check out our own Mark O’Connell's interview with Lasdun.)
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