"One thing we had to do was differentiate ourselves from traditional Mississippi literary culture," said Frederick Barthelme. "As an alternative to that, we're more in tune with the contemporary literary culture of New York." The Hattiesburg American has a nice article about the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi and the people who have been instrumental in making it one of the country's best writing programs.
Apparently, Milan Kundera is causing untold suffering in his native country:
The 77-year-old, who wrote his last three novels in French, insists on translating them into Czech himself — and he's in no hurry. So when one impatient anonymous literary toiler posted an illegal translation of Kundera's second-to-last novel, Identity, to the Blogger.com site in June, "he was upset," says his friend and Czech agent, Jirí Srstka. Srstka's agency wants Google — which owns Blogger.com — to pull the bootlegged version.
Penguin is republishing all of Albert Camus' novels yet again, so in an attempt to get to the bottom of the Camus legend, the BBC skims the surface:
There's no escaping that Camus has a particular appeal for male readers. And a survey of most significant books, produced by academic and cultural commentator Lisa Jardine, found that The Outsider was the runaway winner for men.
"What Camus stands for is unsentimental outsiderness - that's what Morrissey was and probably what gets people going about Pete Doherty," she says.
And its account of a "moody, slouchy, isolated, slightly murderously-inclined bloke" taps into something in the male world-view, she says, and into the "moody, alienated young men" in each generation.
Also, and very importantly, it's incredibly short at little more than 100 pages. While women opt for lengthy Victorian novels as their "watershed" novels, men want books that are sharp and to the point.
And just the thing to leave out if you want to impress someone.
Kinky Friedman gets to stay Kinky on the Texas ballot. {This made me think of something and correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't San Francisco pass a law to prevent people from running for office under an assumed name following Jello Biafra's attempt to become the city's mayor in the late 70s? Not that Jello has anything to do with Kinky.}
Did you know Google Book Search has a blog? In one of its most recent post, they give details on the four ways you can view books at GBS. Including the eye-destroying full view:
For books in Full View, you can view the entire book. These include books that we've verified are in the public domain, or those that the publisher or author has decided to make fully browsable. Some examples of materials presented in Full View (in the U.S.) are Charles Sumner's eulogy for Abraham Lincoln from 1865 and a collection of Edgar Allan Poe's stories from 1903.
In other eBook news, the World eBook Fair is offering over 300,000 books for free for your downloading pleasure. There's also quite a few free and legal audio books in mp3 format for those of you not wanting to burn your retinas. The fun (and downloading) ends on August 4.
Finally, congratulations to SoT guest blogger TJ and his wife, Nicole.
Thanks, Jeff! You've inspired me to campaign for naming the baby Kinky Jello Jackson. Boy or girl.
Posted by: TJ | July 11, 2006 at 09:24 AM