Articles tagged "literature"

This week's photos are named after a term* in Taiwan, which Tao's mom says she first heard on TV, for people who seem unable to stop looking at their phones while in public.

Ah, Manhattan's Upper West Side: where the money flows aplenty, nepotism is a birthright, and the consequence for every action—economic collapse, poverty, fanatical terrorism, etc.—always falls to someone else, outside their zone.

Coconut Books is the print arm of the longest-running online poetry publisher I can think of. In the past several months they’ve released a slew of wicked new books. Here are my thoughts on three of them, along with an excerpt from each.

Talking to the "media inventor" about content, containers, and things that are not on the Internet.

Since roughly the 1960s, written American English has slowly diverged from the English of our British cousins. Relative to the British, American writing is more emotional now. OMG ALL CAPS!

In a stunning upset of red-hot author Junot Diaz, Claire Vaye Watkins took home The Story Prize, the Stanley Cup of short-fiction prizes.

Like anyone who's spent months reading a 1,008-page book, particularly this one, I'm at a loss.

When Joyce’s Ulysses, neither a short book nor a breezy read, was released in China in 1994, it sold more than 85,000 copies.

On top of the growing popularity of ebooks and the Orwellian end of the written word as we know it, Jonathan Franzen now has to deal with this. And he just lost self-proclaimed “Luddite” Thomas Pynchon "to the digital tide":http://motherboard.vice.co…

Something broke in the mix of drugs and sex and leather-clad hacking. In the slippage from underground to Billy Idol, from sub-culture to fashion, from present to future, the movement evaporated. Or maybe it just evolved into birds.

I put the question about cyberpunk to ten science-fictional thinkers, including a coterie of the genre’s parents/

First of all, you can't simply _become_ a cyberpunk. And not now. Certainly not now, not that cyberpunk is "everywhere":http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/6/5/what-happened-to-cyberpunk--2. But close your eyes, put on your VR goggles, and return to

He was on the verge of dying, but his avatar looks kind of like a mix of a young James Joyce and Malcolm Gladwell. Skip the introduction by "Infinite Mind" host John Hockenberry by fast forwarding to 3:38. 11:50 is where he expresses resentment for h…

Franco Moretti, English professor at Stanford, has diagrammed and quantified the plot of _Hamlet_, charting the relationships among characters based solely on whether they speak to one another during the play. The "network analysis":http://litlab.sta…

Laura Green can't "celebrate" David Foster Wallace's new, final book. She saw his sickness for what it was: a debhilitating madness that kept him from enjoying life. She has her own sadness now, having watched her husband die, and her own guilt. She