From Cory Doctorow’s Introduction to Little Brother: “I wrote Little Brother in a white-hot fury between May 7, 2007 and July 2, 2007: exactly eight weeks from the day I thought it up to the day I finished it (Alice, to whom this book is dedicated, had to put up with me clacking out the [...]
From Neil Gaiman’s Journal’s Scary eyes: “I learned from Harper Collins that 68,000 unique visitors have read the [free] book pages of American Gods [online], 3,000,000 book pages viewed in aggregate, and that the weekly book sales of American Gods have apparently gone up by 300%, rather than tumbling into the abyss.”
In his novel, The Blue Flowers, Raymond Queneau develops two parallel stories. The first concerns the Duke of Auge, a member of the French aristocracy who possesses an inexplicable talent for immortality (his story begins in 1264 and ends, though not with his death, sometime in the 1960s), while the second focuses on a [...]
[Editor's Note: In celebration of his blog's 7th birthday, Neil Gaiman convinced his publishers to put one of his books online for free. The idea, I think, is that either people will start reading the book online, and decide they like it enough to buy it; or they'll read the whole thing online, and like [...]
From Gizmodo’s Stairs Bookcase Actually Makes Me Want to Move to London: “Here’s a great idea for anyone who loves books and doesn’t have enough apartment space or a Kindle: a ’secret staircase’ made of English oak, lined with books left, right and center, leading to a loft bedroom in a Victorian 1898 apartments block.”
From the NY Times’ Think You Have a Book in You? Think Again: “Without attempting to overdo the drama of the difficulty of writing, to be in the middle of composing a book is almost always to feel oneself in a state of confusion, doubt and mental imprisonment, with an accompanying intense wish that one [...]
Russell Hoban’s novel, Riddley Walker, demonstrates “what happens with peopl on the way down from what they ben” (17). Telling the story of Riddley Walker, a young man caught in the political struggles of his time, the novel takes place on the island of Inland (England) perhaps two thousand years after a nuclear apocalypse has [...]
gestalt |gə sh tält; -ˑ sh tôlt| : A physical, biological, psychological, or symbolic configuration or pattern of elements so unified as a whole that its properties cannot be derived from a simple summation of its parts.
Theodore Sturgeon’s novel, More Than Human, tracks the formation of “a gestalt life-form” (105), a “new kind of human [...]
From NY Times article, Prisons Purging Books on Faith From Libraries: “Behind the walls of federal prisons nationwide, chaplains have been quietly carrying out a systematic purge of religious books and materials that were once available to prisoners in chapel libraries. The chaplains were directed by the Bureau of Prisons to clear the shelves of [...]
Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Harper Perrennial Modern Classics) by Annie Dillard
Kyle has read 21 books in the last 12 months.
Now Hearing
Introducing ReCaptcha
First of all, hat tip to Julian’s Twitter message for this one.
Now, maybe you’ve noticed that the comments on FI have been a little slow lately (not to mention the posts themselves). At first, I was thinking that no one was commenting because, well, no one was really writing. But then I remembered, a few [...]