Who Pays Blogs
Science and literature
Why do we love fiction? The New York Times examines the links between science and literature: “It’s not that evolution gives us insight into fiction … but that fiction gives us insight into evolution.”
Tuesday New Release Day: Future, Foer, Food, Info, Boxing, Pym, Patterson, and More
My book, The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books is out today (more on that here), and also out this week is Joshua Foer’s (the latest of the Foer’s to throw his hat in the authorial ring) Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, buzzed about food memoir Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, a new look at the modern world’s most ubiquitous commodity James Gleick’s The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, Library of America boxing anthology At The Fights: American Writers on Boxing, Mat Johnson’s Poe-inspired Pym, and Victoria Patterson’s This Vacant Paradise. New in Paperback: Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask and Chang-rae Lee’s The Surrendered.
2015 Tournament of Books Winner Announced
After five rounds, sixteen books and more hard choices than we can count, The Morning News has chosen this year’s champion of the Tournament of Books. Who won, you ask? (Here’s a hint: we’re pretty happy about it.)
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The question is not what you look at, but what you see.
Google is set to release a set of computerized glasses later this year. The glasses will come equipped with a camera that captures what you see, a projector that reflects data onto a screen between the lenses and your eyes, and a sensor that tracks the movement of your eyes which will in be the method for navigating the device. Basically, we’re all about to become Steve Mann, though according to the Toronto Star the world’s first cyborg has yet to offer any comment.
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The Crash
“Throughout the Crash, I wrote free-hand, not caring about the style or if something I wrote in the afternoon contradicted something I’d established in the story that morning. The priority was simply to get the ideas surfacing and growing. Awful sentences, hideous dialogue, scenes that went nowhere – I let them remain and ploughed on.” Newly minted Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro on writing The Remains of the Day in four weeks.
Taking Off
“Every streetlight is a slightly different hue/of white the squares like the blank faces of robots/offer the Hondas and Toyotas idling in the lot something/like hope and yet I am thinking of all of the people on the planes/landing and taking off the twin miracles of arrival and departure/each of them singing ‘Take Me With You’ whether they know/the song or not they are all singing”. A poem written by Dean Rader on the day of Prince’s death.