Dispatches from the Red Center

“Historians, I believe, are dedicated to fighting against the tide of our social amnesia. The reason they continue to write books about the Holocaust, or Appomatox, or the earthquake in Haiti, is to try to help us remember the suffering and the extent of the damage. Some try to humanize, and others turn to abstraction.” Stewart L. Sinclair writes on burying the remnants of disaster, over at Guernica. Pair with his Millions essay on technology and Apple’s operating systems.

How do you explain the recent “shit storm” at Granta? Let Full-Stop EIC Alex Shephard do it for you.

Publishers Weekly talks up author podcasts “as a viable and entertaining marketing tool,” including Brad Listi’s Other People (which recently featured our own Edan Lepucki), Tom Lutz’s Los Angeles Review of Books, and Book Soup alum Tyson Cornell’s company Rare Bird Lit.

“Why, after all, do writers write? What is the impulse, the insistence on story, on seeing and representing the world? It has little to do with technology although everything to do with narrative, which is a purpose that, on the surface, technology also seems to share. The difference is that the writer creates narrative with intention, whereas technology merely gathers, or processes, information, leaving interpretation, analysis, up to us.” Let’s just say David L. Ulin doesn’t think Joyce would work for Google.

The Howling Fantods live-blogged last week’s DFW conference at CUNY.