You know those lines in novels (and poems)--in great works full of great lines--that just stop you in your tracks? Lines that seem to serve a greater purpose than to merely further the rest of the work, like the author or poet had to insert their philosophical musings somewhere? Poets & Writers Magazine has a tumblr…
Category: Opinion
Remembering Ray Bradbury
Image via Pasadena Museum of History "My tunes and numbers are here. They have filled my years, the years when I refused to die. And in order to do that I wrote, I wrote, I wrote, at noon or 3:00 am. So as not to be dead." (from The Illustrated Man) Credited…
Jennifer Egan Tweets Serial Fiction with “Black Box”
Last week The New Yorker began nightly tweeting portions of a new Jennifer Egan story, titled "Black Box." Over the course of ten installments, Egan's futuristic spy thriller was formed, with each 140-character tweet serving as its heroine's undercover dispatches. Read all together the tweets have a certain poetic quality; you can't help but notice…
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Neil Gaiman’s Advice for Living Creatively
I have no idea who the speakers were at my own graduation ceremonies. Luckily, the kids who just graduated from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia will not have that problem, as their commencement guest was author Neil Gaiman (The Sandman, American Gods, Coraline). Although Gaiman never graduated from any college himself, he is…
Books On Demand: Reinventing the Printing Press
Last week's post spoke a bit about the digital revolution taking place in book publishing. Continuing on that theme, here's an interesting discovery that--in a roundabout fashion--would actually serve to preserve the legacy of printed books: Imagine being able to hold an out-of-print, highly coveted work in your hands--say, Lewis Carroll's original manuscript for Alice…
No Accounting for Taste: A Bunch of Over-Educated People Confess Book Hatred
Y U NO see this book is HORRIBLE? I just asked my group of friends on Facebook to tell me what book they HATE that everyone else seems to love. Well, it has been roughly one hour and we are up to EIGHTY-TWO comments. Now, to look at the list you would think this was NOT…
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The Next Generation Digital Book: A Whole New Way to Read
As a bit of a purist on the book front, it's been a rocky road to accept anything not printed on paper and bound by a soft cover. When e-readers first became popular, I was there, standing on the proverbial soapbox, lamenting to disinterested friends the decline of bookshelves, the end of book publishing. I…
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Cynic No More: Doctoral Student Lands Fame, Job
Not that long ago, aspiring writers had to resort to submitting their work to various magazines and other publishers far and wide. We would tuck our (yes, typewritten) manuscripts into unsympathetic manilla envelopes. Those unsympathetic envelopes would land on the desks of various unsympathetic copy editors, who, I imagined, gave our scripts a glance and…