≡ Category: Books, Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
One of America’s great writers, John Updike, gave an interview this week on San Francisco’s airwaves. He has a new book out, The Widows of Eastwick, a sequel to The Witches of Eastwick, the bestseller he published back in 1984. During this hour, Michael Krasny, one of the better interviewers out there, talks with Updike [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, Books, Sci Fi, Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ 1 Comment
Sci-fi author Neil Gaiman has the right idea. After making his well-known novel American Gods freely available online last year, he has gone the extra mile again in releasing his new novel, The GraveYard Book. In brief, he has just kicked off a nine day book tour, and each day he’s reading a chapter that [...]
≡ Category: Art, Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
Thanks to a heads up from one of our loyal readers (thanks Bob!) you can see a new artistic trend that’s turning books back into trees. Good stuff.
Subscribe to Our Feed
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
Philip Roth’s latest is out. And, as one reviewer described it, the novel, like his last two, is “ruthlessly economical and relentlessly deathbound.” You can read the first chapter of Indignation here for free. Or, buy the novel here.
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
The news of David Foster Wallace’s suicide came as a shock. 46, supremely talented, and gone. We’re not left with much. His books, his essays, and the understandable desire to find some link between his writing and his end. Here’s a line that caught my attention from David Streitfeld’s blog. (He’s a former books editor [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
Horrible story and loss. Apparently suicide. Obit here. More extensive NY Times look back at DFW’s career here.
Below, we have a clip of him reading a piece that he wrote for Harper’s. Also see our previous item: David Foster Wallace: Deciderization 2007 Online, which includes a link to the essay he wrote for Best American [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
In the latest installment of The New Yorker Fiction podcast (iTunes Feed Web Site), Tobias Wolff (author of Old School) reads Stephanie Vaughn’s short story “Dog Heaven.” If you’ve never heard him before, Wolff gives his own work and others a very good read (see our earlier piece.).
Though the podcast is not yet available on [...]
≡ Category: Books, Business, Technology | ≅ Leave a Comment
A quick fyi: BoingBoing blogger Cory Doctorow has released a new collection of essays called Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future. As he summarizes it, the book features “28 essays about everything from copyright and DRM to the layout of phone-keypads, the fallacy of the semantic web, the [...]
≡ Category: Books, Current Affairs | ≅ Leave a Comment
Thomas Friedman’s new book has finally hit the stands. Initially, it was going to be titled “Green is the New Red, White and Blue.” But somehow it got released with the far less artful — though more descriptive — title, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution–and How It Can Renew America. [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
Here’s a good item that came out of yesterday’s book giveaway — Benjamin L called our attention to the fact that you can download a free copy of Little Brother, the new novel by Cory Doctorow, who writes for the popular BoingBoing blog and has consistently backed the whole idea of “open culture.” Released in [...]
≡ Category: Books, Current Affairs, Science | ≅ 24 Comments
What if we disappeared from the face of the earth tomorrow? All of us, just like that? What would happen? How would the remaining world survive or thrive without us? That’s the scenario that gets examined by science writer Alan Weisman (who we interviewed last year) in his non-fiction eco-thriller, The World Without Us.
Now out [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, Books | ≅ 9 Comments
The Alchemist has sold more than 65 million copies and been translated into 56 languages. A huge bestseller, in short. Here it is unabridged and free. I am not sure how long this offer will last. So I would grab it sooner than later — and while you’re at it, don’t forget to look through [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
Darwinmania (as The New York Times dubbed it) is about to begin. During the next year, we will celebrate Darwin’s 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the Origin of Species (download zip audio here) and the discovery of natural selection. It’s pretty much a given that the minutiae of Darwin’s life will get thoroughly [...]
≡ Category: Books, Google, Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ Leave a Comment
Salman Rushdie’s latest book, The Enchantress of Florence: A Novel, has hit the streets. And it comes just three years after his last one, Shalimar the Clown, which makes him a good deal more prolific than many of his contemporaries. (A piece in The Guardian — The Great American Pause — notes that many celebrated [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
The Harry Potter prequel that JK Rowling wrote for charity is now available online. To read it, click here, then click “Read our authors’ stories,” and then click JK Rowling.
Related:
J.K. Rowling Tells Harvard Graduates What They Need to Know
Subscribe to our feed
≡ Category: Books, YouTube | ≅ Leave a Comment
Over the weekend, The Wall Street Journal took a look at an emerging trend in the publishing world — using viral videos to promote new books. The strategy, which hasn’t yet generated much in the way of sales, is being used to market books by established authors (take Jodi Picoult’s 19 Minutes for example) and [...]
≡ Category: Art, Books, Sci Fi | ≅ Leave a Comment
Quick fyi for BoingBoing readers …. Cory Doctorow has just released comic adaptations of his award-winning science fiction stories — Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now. You can download them here for free, or buy the collection on Amazon.
Related Content:
Download free copy of Shake Girl
17 Free and Downloadable Graphic Novels
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
This is a clever web site created by the folks at the New Zealand Book Council. The site creates a replica of a PC desktop environment, and, within the folders, you’ll find texts that can be read on the sly.
Subscribe to our feed in a reader
≡ Category: Books, Stanford | ≅ Leave a Comment
Here at Stanford, a couple of our teachers (Tom Kealey and Adam Johnson) took a novel approach to running a writing class. They wanted to see what happens when 14 students collectively write, edit and illustrate a graphic novel. (A graphic novel is a type of comic book that features a lengthy and complex storyline.) [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
As I write, the most emailed article on The New York Times offers a few reflections on Peter Boxall’s book, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. The Times piece makes a couple of logical points: First, there’s no time to waste if you hope to read every book on the list. Reading a [...]
≡ Category: Books, Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
Segueing from our last post, I wanted to feature a reading given by Tobias Wolff, a master of the short story, who also happens to teach creative writing at Stanford.
In March, he released a new book, Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories. And below we have posted a clip of him reading from a [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
The wisdom of crowds concept works for writing software. (Think open source.) But does it work for writing novels? That’s what Penguin and De Monfort University (in the UK) wanted to figure out when they launched an experiment in February 2007 called “A Million Little Penguins.” Over the course of five weeks, roughly 1500 writers [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
Last week, Junot Diaz landed the Pulitzer Prize for fiction with his debut novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The book, which Diaz took 11 years to write, also won the National Book Critics Circle Award for best novel of 2007. Below, we have Diaz speaking last year about his prize winning book [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ 1 Comment
Penguin is presenting six stories, by six authors, over six weeks, in a series called We Tell Stories. And they’re using the web to tell these stories in original ways. One story, The 21 Steps, gets told over Google Maps — an approach that scores points for creativity, but also tires a little quickly. You [...]
≡ Category: Books, Business, Foreign Language, Media, Technology | ≅ Leave a Comment
The New York Times has a great article on a professor of management science who has founded an almost completely automated publishing company. The 200,000 books he’s published sound, well, terrible, and terribly overpriced: “Among the books published under his name are ‘The Official Patient’s Sourcebook on Acne Rosacea’ ($24.95 and 168 pages long); ‘Stickler [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
Get the “ultimate reading list,” according to the Telegraph. The booklist (access here) ranges from “classics and sci-fi to poetry, biographies and books that changed the world.” And while you’re at it, check out this list of life-changing books created by our very own readers.
Subscribe to Our Feed
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
As a New Yorker living rather permanently in sunny California, I feel somewhat obliged to mention this: New York Magazine has pulled together a list of “26 works of lapidary New Yorkitude” — that is, highly literary books that obsess over the great city. On the list, you’ll find works by Norman Mailer, Bernard Malamud, [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
We take you back to the mid 1950s, to an interview with Vladimir Nabokov and Lionel Trilling that was conducted soon after the publication of Lolita (1955). Lolita’s basic plot is well known — middle-aged Humbert Humbert develops a passionate obsession for twelve-year old Dolores Haze and takes her on the road. For some critics, [...]
≡ Category: Books, Web/Tech | ≅ Leave a Comment
At The Berkman Center for Internet and Society (at Harvard Law School), Clay Shirky gave a talk on his highly touted new book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. You can catch his talk here: video for computer or portable device - high res video - mp3 audio. And sample some of [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
When Amazon’s Kindle hit the streets last November, the critics gave the newfangled ebook reader mixed reviews. The customers, however, have been saying something a little bit different. Sales have been brisk, a bit too brisk actually. Waiting up to six weeks to get the Kindle, customers have been getting huffy, and last week Amazon’s [...]
