With the help of Our Final Hour author Martin Rees, Cambridge will soon open a Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. The Centre will investigate the threats posed by “artificial intelligence, climate change, nuclear war and rogue biotechnology.” To my ears, this sounds an awful lot like Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, which was memorably depicted in John Jeremiah Sullivan’s “Violence of the Lambs.”
Choose Your Own Apocalypse: Skynet or Stingrays
Tuesday New Release Day: Hunter; Dee; Patterson; Harper; Middleton; Perham
Out this week: Eat Only When You’re Hungry by Lindsay Hunter; The Locals by Jonathan Dee; Rebellion by Molly Patterson; Red Light Run by Baird Harper; Darkansas by Jarret Middleton; and Double Portrait by Brittany Perham. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
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Curiosities: Three Feet of Paper
Conversational Reading covers “Four Greek Writers That You Should (and Can) Read.”Wells Tower interviewed on The Dinner Party Download.Anne Trubek at Good Magazine recommends our site to “Post-Collegiate Literary Types”The Elegant Variation gets a new reader. Congratulations, Mark!Make of this what you will: “Popular Japanese horror writer Koji Suzuki will publish a short novel called Drop on rolls of toilet paper.”Wikipedia Find of the Week I: Criticism of Wikipedia (so meta)Wikipedia Find of the Week II: No one cares about your garage band (so snarky)”Updike’s Sunset:” Kakutani takes on two newly published Updike collections, My Father’s Tears and Other Stories and Endpoint and Other Poems.Further Reading: Consider revisiting our guest post from last week, Finding Indie Opportunity on The Kindle, where a very interesting discussion developed in the comments.
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David Mitchell on The King’s Speech
The King’s Speech is the first film to portray my speech defect realistically, says novelist David Mitchell.
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An American Poem
“I offer you a moody campaign!” Illustrator Nathan Gould revisits the 1992 presidential election, in which badass feminist (and really great writer) Eileen Myles ran as an “openly-female” write-in candidate.
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Nouvella Press Launches First Author
This week Nouvella Books launches their first novella, The Last Repatriate by Matthew Salesses. You have five more days to get a copy of the limited first edition. Get it while you can, folks!
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