Sherlock Holmes has solved his greatest mystery yet. It only took 125 years, but Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective is in the public domain. A federal judge has ruled that all Sherlock Holmes stories published before January 1, 1923 are no longer under U.S. copyright law.
Sherlock Holmes and the Mysterious Copyright
Data-Mining, The Trial, and America
“Joseph K., that icon of single-lettered anonymity from Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial,” writes Tom Engelhardt for Guernica, “would undoubtedly have felt right at home in [James] Clapper’s Washington.”
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Rachel Eliza Griffiths on the Rhythms of Grief
Rachel Eliza Griffiths describes the challenges she faced writing her new book of poetry, Seeing the Body, an examination of grief, art, and remembrance.
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War Stories
Matthew Jakubowski writes an experimental review of the first English translation of Mercè Rodoreda’s final novel, War, So Much War. Pair with this excerpt from the novel, which appeared in the new issue of Harper’s.
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Crime and Punishment and Singing
Fyodor Dostoevsky‘s Crime and Punishment is getting the musical treatment, and though “it does not seem the most likely candidate to provide musical fun for all the family” for a long list of reasons – “heavy drinking, prostitution, a double axe murder and hours of psychological torment” – we’re already planning our trips to Moscow for the premier. This is also a good opportunity to revisit the debate over who’s greater, Dostoevsky or Tolstoy?
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Ask Us Anything: Swarm & Spark
Swarm and Spark, a new column at The Millions, invites you to write with your questions about publishing, the literary life, or writing. The column is written by two anonymous figures: a NYC editor with years in the industry and an MFA professor at a long-established program. Ask anything that has plagued, confounded, pleased or troubled you about your life in and around literature and you may be answered, always with respect: your question will be treated as anonymous as well. Send your true confessions, complaints and queries to [email protected].
An American Point of View
The international popularity and utility of English doesn’t show any signs of slowing, but what will the language look like after a few generations of increasing usage? The Economist gives a brief answer, but it doesn’t address the ways English is or will be used by different people to tell their stories. Damian Fowler addresses this when he asks, “[W]hat does it mean to have an American point of view,” or to call a book American in tone, as opposed to British or just English-language? In a blog post for The Paris Review, Fowler offers an answer: American novels are characterized by “a spare, sure sense of narrative, reflected in a colloquial voice, free of affectation.”
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Very Secret and Odd
Recommended Reading: Søren Kierkegaard and Anna Akhmatova overheard whispering on a stairwell.
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