“The company, in its most cutting-edge incarnation, has become the arena in which narratives and fictions, metaphors and metonymies and symbol networks at their most dynamic and incisive are being generated, worked through and transformed… It is funky architecture firms, digital media companies and brand consultancies that have assumed the mantle of the cultural avant garde. It is they who, now, seem to be performing writers’ essential task of working through the fragmentations of old orders of experience and representation, and coming up with radical new forms to chart and manage new, emergent ones. If there is an individual alive in 2015 with the genius and vision of James Joyce, they’re probably working for Google.” From The Guardian, a look at “fiction in the age of data saturation,” with a healthy dose of anthropology thrown in just for fun.
Joyce Works for Google
Fantasy Authors game
If Fantasy Football is football for people who don’t like dirt or concussions, here’s a Fantasy Football for people who don’t like football. Book Riot has the details, which involve tracking your favorite authors’ career highlights much like an athlete’s: “publishes a book,” sure, but also “appears in another author’s book trailer,” “fatwa issued against author,” and “dies.” Our own Edan Lepucki makes the Rookies bracket, but, please–no fatwas just to win.
Not Very Titillating
Those of you who know the joy of reading romance novels with your friends have probably wondered at some point what people who write erotica are like. Are they bankers and professionals? Housewives and mistresses? Are they some combination of all of the above? At Slate, a chaste look at the lives of unchaste writers.
a hectic, unblanced life
D.T. Max’s forthcoming David Foster Wallace biography, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, has been excerpted in Newsweeek magazine, and you can read it online.