Going to Be a Slow Week . . .
This is probably going to be a slow week for Three Percent. Dubravka Ugresic arrives in Rochester tonight and we have a packed weeks of events, interviews, classroom appearances, etc., lined up for her. Specifically, tomorrow morning she’ll be on WHAM-13’s morning show (a local TV-station, whose previous guests ...
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Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis!
I absolutely love pronouncing Machado de Assis’s name. It flows in a lively, exotic way—especially when spoken with an exaggerated accent—and is one of the longest author names I know of. When we first started Open Letter, Machado de Assis’s Epitaph of a Small Winner (aka, The Posthumous Memoirs of ...
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R.I.P. DFW
David Foster Wallace’s passing this past Friday is a huge blow, and incredibly sad. There’s not much to add to the discussions and appreciations online (such as this one that Ed Champion put together). DFW was an amazingly talented writer, whose Infinite Jest is one of the greatest books to come out in the past ...
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Two Notes on the NEA
As reported in the New York Times Dana Gioia is stepping down from the NEA in January: “I’ve given up six years of my life as a writer,” Mr. Gioia, 57, said earlier in the week from his office in Washington. “I felt I had to go back to writing when I still have the kind of stamina to do it ...
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Plastic Logic's Pretty Cool Looking E-Reader
Today at DEMOfall 08, Plastic Logic revealed a pretty damn slick looking e-reader that could (in theory) end up competing with the Kindle—especially in terms of business users. As you can see in this video the reader is a 8 1/2” x 11” full-sized reading touch-screen that’s about the size of a ...
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Bob Stein's Unified Theory of Publishing
The other day, Bob Stein posted a really interesting article at If:Book about his so-called “unified theory of publishing” which tries to address these particular questions: What are the characteristics of a successful author in the era of the digital network? Ditto for readers: how do you account for ...
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Review: I Love Dollars by Zhu Wen
Our latest review is of I Love Dollars by Chinese author Zhu Wen, and translated by Julia Lovell. This first came out in hardcover from Columbia University Press in 2006, and more recently was published in paperback by Penguin. We’ve been meaning to review it for ages—anything tagged as “a Chinese Larry ...
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