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+15 +5
12 novelists tell their scariest bite-size stories
In honor of Halloween, Salon asked 12 novelists to try their hand at the form. Below are their ghostly, bloody, watery and surprisingly pet-focused forays into darkness.
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+17 +3
Mary Shelley’s Handwritten Manuscripts of Frankenstein Now Online for the First Time
Thanks to the newly-opened Shelley-Godwin Archive, you can read “for the first time in digital form all the known manuscripts of Frankenstein,” Mary Shelley’s finest work and arguably the most famous work of British Romanticism.
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+15 +3
Is Amazon bad for publishers?
Duff McDonald has a wonderful review of Brad Stone's new book on Amazon in the NYT; he's a fantastic nonfiction book reviewer.
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+10 +3
When did our plainest punctuation mark become so aggressive?
The period was always the humblest of punctuation marks. Recently, however, it’s started getting angry. I’ve noticed it in my text messages and online chats, where people use the period not simply to conclude a sentence, but to announce “I am not happy about the sentence I just concluded.”
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+21 +5
This Is the Man Bill Gates Thinks You Absolutely Should Be Reading
"There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil," says Bill Gates. Here's why...
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+15 +7
Should cursive be saved?
Common core standards in education are crowding out classroom time for cursive instruction. While many may say in this day and age of technology that keyboards fill the communication void, there are strong advocates of keeping cursive in schools.
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+18 +4
15 powerful insights from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five
There aren’t many writers who witnessed a 20th century apocalypse at first hand. But of those who have Kurt Vonnegut’s response, Slaughter House Five, is arguably the most memorable.
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+10 +3
Slate: "Jonathan Franzen’s First Novel Was Terrible, but it's being reissued anyway"
"Some books ought to be allowed to molder in peace. Jonathan Franzen’s first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City, published in 1988, is a paranoid conspiracy novel, the kind of thing that doesn’t age well—and hasn’t. It has earned some rest. But it’s been trotted out for its 25th anniversary..."
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+19 +7
The Charles Bukowski Tapes: 52 Short Interviews with the Underground Poet
Watch 'The Charles Bukowski Tapes,' a collection of 52 short interviews conducted by French filmmaker Barbet Schroeder, who directed the Bukowski-penned Barfly, with Mickey Rourke as Bukowski stand-in Henry Chinaski.
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+10 +4
The 12 Greatest Fantasy Books Of The Year
The definitive list of the best works of fantasy and everything related to witches, elves and most importantly…dragons this year.
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+11 +3
10 novels written in the 1950s we love even more today
Unlike us forgetful, breakable and generally unreliable human folk, good old books get better and better with age. Or, at least, the books themselves stay the same, but our appreciation of them grows.
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+11 +3
Are Emoticons the Future of Language? PBS Off Book’s New Video Explains
Linguist Ben Zimmer explores the history of emoticons and writing and how they might combine to create a more reflective representation of the human experience.
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+17 +4
Against 'Long-Form Journalism'
When it comes to great magazine writing, what’s in a name?
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+10 +3
Why Do I Write?
‘Why do you write?’ This is a question that I often ask myself. And typically when I’m in the shower and pretending that I’m famous and being interviewed by NPR or the New York Times or something like that — c’mon, you know you do it, too. But it’s a good question. And the answer I give is usually the same: ’I started writing because I felt alone and sad one day. And it’s one thing to tell people you feel alone and sad. And it’s another to tell them a story about loneliness and sadness.’
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+17 +3
10 Words That You May Have Been Misusing
A few of these are obvious, so I tweaked the title.
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+14 +4
15 timeless observations from history’s greatest dystopian novels
The dystopian novel has a long, dark and intriguing history. Kicking off in 1726 with Jonathan Swift’s rip-roaring satire Gulliver’s Travels, it’s gone through numerous transformations in the last three centuries. One thing all these books share, though, is that they make us think long and hard about the societies we live in.
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+27 +6
R.I.P. The Blog, 1997-2013
Sometime in the past few years, the blog died. In 2014, people will finally notice. Sure, blogs still exist, many of them are excellent, and they will go on existing and being excellent for many years to come. But the function of the blog, the nebulous informational task we all agreed the blog was fulfilling for the past decade, is increasingly being handled by a growing number of disparate media forms that are blog-like but also decidedly not blogs.
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+16 +7
I got it wrong: seven writers on why they changed their minds
Our culture values certainty and dogmatism. We should all be more open about the times when we were wrong – and what made us reconsider. Here, seven writers confess all.
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+5 +1
The Awkward Art of Book Trailers
If you want to know what’s wrong with the modern book trailer, you might start by watching the one for Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom.” Sitting at a table in front of several rows of bookshelves and looking directly into the camera, Franzen explains—in a tone that is polite but characteristically aggrieved—his “profound discomfort” with having to use moving images to promote the printed word.
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+6 +3
Writer Ned Vizzini has died at 32
Writer Ned Vizzini died Thursday at age 32 in New York, the city's medical examiner has confirmed. Vizzini committed suicide.
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