As part of the ongoing Miami Book Fair International festivities, WLRN is giving readers a chance to co-author a story with Junot Díaz. Beginning at 5pm today, they will tweet out the first line to a story—provided by Díaz—from their Twitter account. Then readers will use the hashtag “#WLRNStory” to add onto Díaz’s line, and later each other’s lines, and ultimately the entire thing will unfurl before them.
Junot Díaz’s Twitter Fiction
(Not) A Restaurant Review
The Morning News is asking writers to visit restaurants and then write about the experience, so long as the piece they write adheres to two criteria: “1) it is a restaurant review” and “2) it is not a restaurant review.” First on deck: Roxane Gay, whose novel Untamed State was recently reviewed for our site.
The Racket
Tired of reading Mark O’Connell’s articles in silence? Check out his two pieces in The Racket, the first of which features attached audio from the author himself, and the second features an embedded video with Sam Bungey, the publication’s editor. Consider Mark’s reading Exhibit B in the case for Irish Accents Improving Everything, which I brought forth last week.
Cain: Selling a Candidate or Selling Books?
Instead of capitalizing on his newfound momentum by hitting the campaign trail hard, Herman Cain this week opted to spend most of his time promoting his book, This is Herman Cain! My Journey to the White House, which just arrived in retail stores this week.
Evaluate The Integral of Genius
“Courage is not a word I’d use to describe a lot of today’s fiction. Writing, M.F.A. students are often told, is a messy exploration of the self. The result can be a suffocating narcissism, a lack of interest in the kind of extrapolation and exploration that is necessary to both mathematics and literature.” At Page-Turner, Alexander Nazaryan urges young writers to learn math.
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Facebook’s Fakery
Facebook’s amended S-1 to its IPO was filed this week, and the details confirm some of the doubts raised in the last filing. The company estimates that between 5-6% of its most active users could in fact be “duplicate” (read: fake) accounts. Put in more concrete terms, of Facebook’s estimated 850 million users, 46,475,000 may be like this one. (46 million, by the way, is roughly the population of Colombia, Spain, or Ukraine.)
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