Essays
February 6, 2012
Bookstore Chronicles: Switch Comedies, Fake Words, Loose Adaptations 1
by Bryan Charles
I went to the theater with my girlfriend Margie. We bought tickets to see The Firm and sat in the last row making out the whole time. I was trying to do what they say can never be done — go home again or recapture the past.
February 3, 2012
My Twins: On First Children and First Novels 2
by Ramona Ausubel
I just had twins. One of them is human — fingers and toes, eyes and ears. The other is a hardcover — 346 pages long, eight years in the making — my first novel. These are very different creatures, yet they were both made somewhere inside me, gestating over months or years.
February 1, 2012
I Greet You in the Middle of a Great Career: A Brief History of Blurbs 34
by Alan Levinovitz
Hyperbole, fakery, shameless cronyism: blurbs, like bullshit, existed long before the term coined to describe them.
January 25, 2012
Copyrights Wake: SOPA, James Joyce, and the Future of Intellectual Property 4
by Maxime D. McKenna
We are going to need a completely new online framework for supporting creators, and to get there, we might have to move beyond a tired notion of “copyright” and towards “author’s rights.”
January 24, 2012
Fragmentary: Writing in a Digital Age 12
by Guy Patrick Cunningham
Fragmentary writing captures the tension between “digital” and “analog” reading better than anything else out there. And that tension, in many ways, is the defining feature of the contemporary reading experience.
January 23, 2012
Where Parents Get Their Power: Evidence from The Brothers Karamazov 7
by Kevin Hartnett
It occurred to me that the Grand Inquisitor’s interpretation of the Temptation of Christ effectively describes the power I hold over my two sons.
