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23 Feb 2012 19:27

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Culture: Scifi author shares his series’ ending with terminally-ill fan

  • “You’re going to put him in a coma”: See what happens when one Reddit user surprises his terminally-ill friend with an item that he might not have otherwise lived to see. Prepare to have your faith in humanity restored….and to finish off a box of Kleenex. (h/t 14kgoldnycsource

07 Oct 2010 10:21

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World: Show-off: Mario Vargas Llosa wins Nobel Prize for literature

This Peruvian dude is the first Latin American Nobel Prize winner in literature since 1990. What you’re witnessing now is this guy’s head getting big. source

03 Jul 2010 19:31

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Culture: Is the novel dead? Literary critic/jerk Lee Siegel says so

  • CRAP! We were going to write our novel starting next week! The New York Observer critic says that the novel, as an artform, has completely bypassed the American reading public, and novelists are better curators than writers. “For better or for worse, the greatest storytellers of our time are the non-fiction writers,” he writes, as numerous writers cry in their Earl Grey tea. Siegel thinks the overanalysis of the artform has turned into something readers can’t simply appreciate. Siegel’s critics argue that literary critics in general avoid more modern forms of literature, such as blogs and genre fiction. We argue that whether or not the novel is dead, idiotic posturing by people on ivory towers that has no effect on everyday life is alive and well. source

08 Oct 2009 08:32

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Culture: A “landscape of the dispossessed”: Herta Müller’s Nobel Prize win

The German novelist, essayist and poet, born in Romania, is the 12th female winner of the most literary Nobel Prize. source

02 Mar 2009 23:10

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Culture: David Foster Wallace’s failed struggle with the written word

  • What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.
  • Author David Foster Wallace • From a 2001 short story. Wallace died last year after committing suicide. His unfinished third novel, “The Pale King,” will come out next year, but an excerpt is available at The New Yorker Web site. On a side note, this linked article would require 800 ShortFormBlog posts to do justice; it’s freaking huge. • source