December 2011
18 posts
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“They also note that ‘cyberspace and forest space may also be seen as holey...”
– You would be correct in assuming that a brief essay about the Deleuzean geophilosophy of Tolkien’s Middle Earth by Adam Roberts, Paul Kincaid and others is far, far up my alley.
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Listen
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“I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, upon various subjects;...”
– John Keats, from a letter to his brothers (George & Thomas) on Dec. 22, 1817. (via ecantwell)
This is still perhaps the single most desirable quality in literature, and the one with the single most useless name. Even literatures, like Science Fiction, whose very generic definitions demand of...
swisslandia asked: Hi. Loved your post rebutting that tool at Slate's tool-y article. Well done. One question - what is the book that you described as "a book about light and scents and changing seasons and lust and memory, set in a small south-eastern Polish town"? Because I want that. Bad. Really, I was sold at light & scents, but by the time you got to memory I was vibrating with desire....
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Chad Post on our friend at Slate. →
Chad Post, whose post yesterday absolved Amazon a bit much for my tastes, (though as I tried to make clear he and I agree about 99% of the issue) has just written a much better response to Manjoo’s Slate article than my own.
The best part of his post, other than his reiterated but somewhat misleading Three Paths of Action conclusion (I’d say that the concerned actors from your first...
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“Amazon have access to more readers every day than I have seen in ten years as a...”
– Bookavore and I sometimes, rarely, argue about specific books, but when it comes to talking about what we should be talking about, she is always right.
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Surprisingly, I am less sure than this guy on...
A gentleman named Farhad Manjoo just posted a proudly contrarian article on Slate explaining why independent bookstores are not only irrelevent but maybe even harmful. I work at an independent bookstore, so that’s an argument I’d be very very curious to see made well. Honestly, I know the failings of small booksellers as well as anyone, and it’d be good to see them articulated....
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A brief note to Chad Post, because his comments...
Here is Chad over at Three Percent, the blog of his really great press Open Letter, spurred into commenting again by today’s Times op-ed from Richard Russo about Amazon’s recent showrooming app promotion.
A point of clarification: Chad Lives in Rochester, is a swell dude, is very supportive of indie bookstores and translation, and has taken grant money from Amazon for his press. So...
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My New Policy
I will pay $5 if you go into your friendly local Amazon retailer and take a photo of some of their barcodes. Help yourself to a coffee and book reading and comfy chair while you’re at it.
That, or Jeff Bezos being pied. I’ll pay for those photos, too.
“There are moments in novels which are absolutely true–and those are the kinds of...”
– Jeffrey Eugenides (via theparisreview)
Such a tragic misunderstanding of fiction and truth and, assuming this isn’t a butchered quote, how indicative words work in sentences.
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