Entries from October 2009

Oct. 30, 2009

Financial Lives of the Poets

The publication of This Side of Paradise when he was 23 immediately put Fitzgerald’s income in the top 2 percent of American taxpayers. Thereafter, for most of his working life, he earned about $24,000 a year, which put him in the top 1 percent of those filing returns. Today, a taxpayer would have to earn [...]

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Oct. 30, 2009

“Immersive text-only experiences”

Over the course of the [Frankfurt Book] Fair various players offered phrases such as “a digital manifestation of what was a book” and “long-form narrative delivered digitally” and “story-telling” and “immersive text-only experiences,” and it is clear that the reason for such a profusion of vague terms is not obtuseness but a recognition that we’re [...]

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Oct. 29, 2009

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is … Pippi Longstocking?

Stieg Larsson’s detective character, Lisbeth Salander, the “girl with the dragon tattoo,” was apparently inspired by Pippi Longstocking. According to a former work colleague, Stieg got the idea for the character Lisbeth Salander after a discussion during a break from work. They were talking about how different characters from children’s books would manage and behave [...]

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Oct. 28, 2009

Philip Roth on the novel’s “cultic” future

More clips from this interview here.

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Oct. 28, 2009

Michael Penn’s photographs of Philadelphia

Beautiful images, mostly of Philadelphia, by photographer Michael Penn. View more of his portfolio here. (Above: “Storm Over Fishtown,” 2008, 10×10.)

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Oct. 22, 2009

A Favorite Review

I don’t want to turn this blog into a sellathon for my books. I am quite bad at self-promotion, probably because it makes me so uncomfortable. But as I’ve been transferring material from my old web site to this new blog, I ran across a review of The Strangler that I particularly relished and want [...]

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Oct. 21, 2009

Scrapbook

Today, the intricate, multi-season narrative TV drama has the same dominant cultural sway over well-educated, well-off adults that the latest Salinger short story had in the 1950s.

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Oct. 21, 2009

A “Strangler” Word Cloud

My novel The Strangler rendered as a word cloud.

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Oct. 19, 2009

This is your brain on e-books

Jonah Lehrer on the neuroscience of how our brains process the words we read and how that process will be affected by ebooks.

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Oct. 19, 2009

Cory Doctorow’s “Makers” Tiles

Cory Doctorow and his publisher, Tor, have a neat promo for Doctorow’s forthcoming novel Makers. The novel will be published in November but is currently being serialized online in 81 installments. For each installment, Tor has commissioned a small square illustration. These illustrations fit together like tiles in any arrangement you like. Tor has assembled [...]

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