Ignore films like Memento when writing, Steve Almond argues, and instead focus on old-fashioned devices like narrative, plot, and character development.
Once Upon A Time
Pirate King
Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom’s capture was widely publicized last month, but this Business Week profile of the man’s ascent to “Pirate King” makes for a super entertaining (and informative) read.
Amazon in Stores
In an interesting turn of events, Amazon has opened its first brick-and-mortar store in Seattle: Amazon Books. Marketing information from the company’s website will help decide how to stock its shelves. Our own Michael Bourne announces that Amazon has purchased the English language.
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Gilead
Recommended Reading: Willa Paskin’s review of Hulu’s adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale.
Multiplicity
Flip through the blurbs on a recently published novel and you’re likely to come across a ton of stock phrases. Gary Shteyngart parodied this repetition — as well as other facets of the blurb-industrial complex — in a bit of improv last year. At The Morning News, Christine Gosnay writes about a poem that gave her a genuinely new reaction: the sense that she was “more than one person.”
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Does This Mean Lewis Lapham is Morpheus?
Picador’s Gabrielle Gantz is holding monthly conversations with bloggers, and she posts the results on the publishing house’s fantastic Tumblr. Here she interviews Aidan Flax-Clark, associate editor of Lapham’s Quarterly, and gets him to discuss the similarities between his research and The Matrix.
Geoff Dyer on Novelistic Essays and Essayistic Novels
Need to kill 37 minutes? Check out “The Novelistic Essay and the Essayistic Novel,” a lecture by Geoff Dyer from this past year’s Key West Literary Summit. (h/t Mark O’Connell)
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Brit Bennett on the Opposite Sides of the Color Line
Brit Bennett discusses her latest book, The Vanishing Half, which follows twin sisters as one lives life as a white woman and one as a Black woman.
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