Real Hard
Getting the Word Out
In his write up here of an important, but overlooked essay on copyright by Lewis Hyde, guest contributor Craig Fehrman noted that the Hyde essay had been downloaded only 746 times in nearly four years. Now, after the piece here about it, and subsequent linking by Boing Boing, the essay is the second most popular on the Social Science Research Network.
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The Future of Latin American Fiction
If you’re an enthusiast of Spanish-language literature and haven’t been following the serialization of Jorge Volpi‘s essay on “The Future of Latin American Fiction” at Three Percent, you should be.
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Epic Listening
Speaking of podcasts: our own Epic Fail hits the Culture File podcast. Listen up!
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Profile of Rick Moody
At the Hartford Advocate, Craig Fehrman talks to Rick Moody about his “perplexing” career and latest novel, The Four Fingers of Death: “Moody isn’t the worst writer of his generation, but he is one of the most successful …”
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Stevenson as Kurtz
“Since the middle of the 20th century, the academy has conditioned us to stay grounded within texts and steer clear of writers’ biographies for insights while biographers are often timid about the kind of playful speculation that we can undertake here in Slate. Readers, myself included, tend to wonder about the sources for characters the likes of Kurtz, Sherlock Holmes, and Jay Gatsby—larger-than-life, mysterious, existing on a kind of separate plane—and in doing so we are continuing the quests of the narrators who tried first (Marlow, Watson, and Carraway).” Matthew Pearl asks: was Robert Louis Stevenson the blueprint for Conrad‘s Kurtz?
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