David Bezmozgis‘s beautiful and painful essay on befriending his literary hero, Leonard Michaels.
The perils of befriending your heros.
.literature
Amazon's attempts to control literary domain names like ".book" and ".read" are not making the publishing community happy.
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P.T. Anderson Wants to Direct Pynchon Novel
Vulture reports that Paul Thomas Anderson wants to adapt Thomas Pynchon's 2009 novel Inherent Vice for the big screen.
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An Autocrat’s Guide to World Cup Qualification
Recommended reading: What do you get the guy you can't get anything else--the one with his own oil-rich country--like the Emir of Qatar? The LA Review recommends starting with the World Cup.
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The Girl With the Pigtails
Could it be for the best that Lisbeth Salander outlived her creator? Do writers own the rights to their own superstar characters, or do the rights belong to the readers? These questions and more are explored in a fascinating essay from The Atlantic. Here’s a Millions piece in which Pippi Longstocking is touted as Salander’s literary forebear.
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Harry Potter on Kindle
Pottermore is open for business. J.K. Rowling's boy wizard books are now available on Kindle for the first time ever.
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On Internet Fiction
Jacob Silverman reviews two new novels – Note to Self and The More You Ignore Me – that “take on one incarnation of the Internet: the Internet as pathology” but ultimately fail to succeed “in exploring or critiquing digital life with any authority.” He notes that “like any technology, [the Internet] has to be shaped for the purposes of literature.”
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