A Nicholson Baker essay on Wikipedia and its pleasures (and its frustrations), has resurfaced in the latest issue of Lapham’s Quarterly.
Not notable?!
Desire and Freedom
Recommended Reading: Can desire thrive without freedom? On the works of Margaret Atwood and Michel Houellebecq in The Atlantic. Our essay on Atwood’s vision of the future and review of Ben Jeffery’s Anti-Matter: Michel Houellebecq and Depressive Realism pair nicely.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Gaiman, Hage, Bell, Delijani, Calvino, Peach
New this week: The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman, Carnival by Rawi Hage, In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods by Matt Bell, Children of the Jacaranda Tree by Sahar Delijani, the collected letters of Italo Calvino, and the seventh issue of McSweeney’s food mag Lucky Peach.
Style-Elements
A question that plagues American writers: how would the lit world be different if everybody followed the rules in The Elements of Style? The answer: it would look like this.
Dear Colon
On the heels of all this talk of colons, Emdashes solicits open letters to punctuation marks.
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“Eyes Without a Face”
John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats fame has a debut novel, Wolf in White Van, longlisted for the National Book Award, and Dwight Garner reviews the “strange and involving” novel for The New York Times.
The Hunted
Veterans of writing workshops will know that a good story has a heavy dose of conflict. One can add it to a story in many ways, but one of the best and most reliable is to add a predator, either in the form of a threatening organisation or an animal or person with malicious intent. At the Ploughshares blog, Year in Reading alum Megan Mayhew Bergman reflects on predatory literature.
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Crowd-source Everything
In addition to the fact Amazon reviewers and experts agree “in aggregate about the quality of a book,” non-professional reviews on Amazon tend to be “more eclectic,” “more supportive of debut authors,” and less biased in favor of authors with whom they associate than media experts.
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