David Carr takes a look at The Atavist, whose team of multimedia gurus has won the attention (and seed funding) of Google founder Eric Schmidt. Of course, the outfit’s also been receiving generous attention for their quality work, too. (I mentioned them a few months ago.) More recently, however, certain scientific circles have fawned over the subject of their story The Electric Mind, which tracks one paralyzed woman and the scientists who developed the BrainGate technology which eventually got her moving… robotically.
The Electric Mind, The Atavist
Victoria Chang on the Humor and Oddity in Obituaries
Victoria Chang discusses the art of the obituary poem, as seen in her newest collection, Obit, a memorial to the dead and a reflection on grief.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Tyler; Shriver; Watson; Tremblay; Raymond; Juchau
Out this week: Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler; The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver; As Good as Gone by Larry Watson; Disappearance at Devil’s Rock by Paul Tremblay; My Last Continent by Midge Raymond; and The World Without Us by Mireille Juchau. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2016 Book Preview.
O Detroit
You may have heard that our own Bill Morris has a new book on shelves. He talked about it with fellow Millions staff writer and California author Edan Lepucki. At the LARB, Diana Clarke reviews the book, which she calls “a sharp critique of the contemporary American post-racial narrative,” among other things.
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87th Annual California Book Awards Finalists
The 87th annual California Book Awards, which “recognizes the state’s best writers and illuminate the wealth and diversity of literature written in California,” announced this year’s finalists. The nominees include Rachel Khong‘s Goodbye, Vitamin, Viet Thanh Nguyen‘s The Refugees, and Zinzi Clemmons‘s What We Lose (here’s the full list). From our archives: The Millions’ interview with Khong.
Appearing Elsewhere
I have an essay in the September issue of Poets & Writers on “The Social Value of MFA Programs.” Sadly, P&W deems the piece too valuable to give away for free on the Web, so if you want to read it, you’ll have to go to your local newsstand and buy a copy.
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Sherlock Holmes and the Mysterious Copyright
Sherlock Holmes has solved his greatest mystery yet. It only took 125 years, but Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective is in the public domain. A federal judge has ruled that all Sherlock Holmes stories published before January 1, 1923 are no longer under U.S. copyright law.
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Family Tree
“Every evening we spent an hour and a half in the drawing-room, and, as far back as I can remember, he found some way of amusing us himself…many of the great English poems now seem to me inseparable from my father; I hear in them not only his voice, but in some sort his teaching and belief,” Virginia Woolf wrote of her father for his biographer, but who was Leslie Stephen, exactly?
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