* Videos of the aftermath from today's bombing in Oslo. * Extremely captivating: Yemen on the brink of hell. * Report on the taboo issue of men being raped as a weapon of wartime aggression. * Joseph Heller, Robert Gottlieb, Candida Donadio, and how Catch-22 came about. * Terrific visualization of the
Tao Lin and his band of followers at Muumuu House are some of the most vehemently disliked—and discussed—writers on the internet. Critics call them hip. Haters call them frauds. But their fiction may be just what our digital lives deserve.
* A sewage treatment plant catches fire in New York, mIllions of gallons of untreated sewage flow into the city's rivers. * More than 1% of all U.S. high temperature records were broken during yesterday's heat. * Can the grid handle a heat wave of this magnitude? * With
3:06 a.m. I wake up, flip on my bedside transistor to see what they are talking about on WFAN 660 AM out of New York City. I’m in rural Chatham County, NC, with three acres, heavy woods with eight kinds of trees, and a creek. Crickets, cicadas,
Florida is America’s most-abused state, and Tallahassee its biggest target for bi-coastal writers who pick low-hanging fruit—rednecks, old people—and wouldn’t know an alligator from their elbow. The slander has gone far enough. On behalf of every Tallahussey and T-Town man, let the corrections begin
Damn if American TV’s Shrinky-Dink oven can’t produce a single good detective. Many other things we do extremely well in this golden age of the small screen. Novelists with epaulets are signing up to bang out series. David Foster Wallace thought the best writing currently done in
* Lack of coordination, rivalries threaten Libyan rebels' goal of toppling Gadhafi. * Minister hopes London factions can reconcile differences over who gets to wear pearl buttons. * TSA to introduce new scanner software that shows hidden objects, but not naked passengers. * How an occult philosophy could be the missing piece in
* Famine declared in southern Somalia, where child malnutrition rate can soar to 55%. * Former Chilean President Allende's corpse confirms official story: suicide, not murder. * Surprise snowstorm leaves Chile blanketed under "white earthquake." * Egypt's oldest political prisoner speaks. * Who and where are America's
Our man in Boston and Jim Shepard, the author most recently of “You Think That’s Bad,” discuss whacko projects, researching short stories by jet, and how much gold it takes for a writer to dump Knopf’s Gary Fisketjon.
Carmela Ciuraru’s first nonfiction work, Nom de Plume: The (Secret) History of Pseudonyms, was recently published by HarperCollins. The book explores the biographies of several writers—Patricia Highsmith, Mark Twain—who adopted pen names and their various reasons for doing so. Ciuraru has written for the New York Times,
