Recently I reported on the launch of Two Dollar Radio Moving Pictures, a cinematic venture from the indie publishers in Ohio. Since then, a pair of teaser trailers have been released for the first films in the organization’s pipeline. One is for The Greenbrier Ghost, which was co-written by Crapalachia author Scott McClanahan. The second is for The Removals, and it was directed by Orange Eats Creeps author Grace Krilanovich. (A few years back I gave TOEC some love in my Year In Reading post.)
Two Trailers from Two Dollar Radio Moving Pictures
Robinson on Public Education
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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.
Company Men
The office novel, by nature, is a tricky construct, if only because your average white-collar job doesn’t offer much in the way of fiction-worthy moments. That said, recent books like Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris demonstrate how fruitful it can be to wring drama out of the rat race. In the latest issue of Dissent, Cubed author Nikil Saval delves into the contradictions of office fiction. FYI, Saval wrote a Year in Reading entry for us.
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The Value of Difficulty
“When we read a book that requires that effort — when the act of reading becomes rigorous and self-aware, rather than effortless and transparent — we get to have a history with what we’ve given ourselves to, a history etched into us by the demanding friction of its difficulty.” Zoë Heller and Leslie Jamison debate whether or not we overvalue difficult literature in The New York Times.
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