Do you love the city of Miami Beach? Prove it with a poem. At stake is a two night stay at the Catalina Hotel and Beach Club, and the deadline for submissions is December 2nd.
That’s One Way to Get to Miami
Double Take on Double Fold
In his 2001 treatise, Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, Nicholson Baker lamented the wholesale transfer of newspaper archives to microfilm and the subsequent destruction of the originals (A recent essay here at The Millions argued that this is still a big problem). But, according to an article in The Missourian newspaper, microfilm may at least be far more permanent than easily corrupted digital archives. As executive editor Tom Warhover notes: “How about those perfectly preserved newspaper pages that have been digitally fossilized? They’re usually stored on hard drives, which can wear out quicker than your grandmother’s underwear.”
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General Spring Feelings
“Welty and Millar struck up an epistolary friendship that endured until his death in 1983, exchanging some 345 letters. Even after the onset of Alzheimer’s disease left Millar unable to reply, Welty wrote him.” On the enduring friendship and almost-romance of Eudora Welty and Ross MacDonald from The Paris Review.
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Words came in, marked for death.
The New Yorker has been hosting a Twitter game show, and this time around the contestants were words and in a macabre turn each word was berated by the audience, the people calling out for the death of that contestant. One word was forced to ultimately bite the bullet and will no longer be welcome in the magazine’s next issue. Tragic.
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Sex, Drugs, and Anniversaries
“For that reason, it’s hard to imagine coming to this book for the first time, and experiencing it in the same way as that college senior back in 2003.” The Outline on the 15-year anniversary of Chuck Klosterman‘s Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. (Read our review of the king of pop culture’s newest book.)
On the State of Syrian Publishing
The Syrian publishing industry is but one of the casualties in the nation’s ongoing civil war. “The whole of publishing is not more than 10 percent of what it was in the past,” says Samer al-Kadri who runs Bright Fingers Publishing House in Damascus.
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Coming to a Bookstore Near You
Check out this clever book trailer for the debut novel House of Tomorrow by Peter Bognanni.
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