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Please Put My Face on the Cover of War & Peace!

Recently, Penguin Group published a book featuring augmented reality technology. We're told this is the first book in the U.S. to be published as such. Check it out here.

Rick Moody's "Some contemporary characters"...

Rick Moody's "Some contemporary characters" is, alas, not at all compelling. But the debate about it, qua effort at Tweetfiction, is quite interesting - and indeed, much more interesting that "Scc" itself.

Is free the price of the future for literature?

We've written before that advertising revenue could enable publishers to make fiction and poetry available for free, to those who read it electronically. Now DailyLit is testing this theory, albeit relying on sponsorship, rather than advertising. Or at least DL is sort of doing this...

We're off...

...for Thanksgiving, turkey, football, Bailey's, stuffing, and the whole lot of everything else. Back on Tuesday, December 1, with a set of wonderful new poems by Natalie Shapero.

Do You Remember Beta?

Amazon is stuffing folks' stockings with the latest Kindle device.  Sony would have everyone using their Reader, and B&N is announcing that folks can't get enough Nookie.  Some people dread the prospect of it all.  By all appearances, the fate of what and how we read is being determined before our eyes.  Or is it? 

Tweetfiction - why not?

Electric Literature continues to innovate, and create a stir while doing so. In my inbox this morning was an EL missive, announcing that next week, its Twitter feed (@ElectricLit, if you're keeping score at home) will be home to a new Rick Moody story, "Some Contemporary Characters." Nice, that, but will the story be good?

The short story (still) doesn't need saving

"Save the short story!" is nothing but a fundraising rallying cry, raised by short-fiction publishers looking to build their subscription lists and grant base. It works, at least to a degree, because short-lit fans, writers, and editors know they're a tiny group, see the explosion of non-print media, and the collapse of traditional publishers, and draw the logical conclusion that their beloved endeavor is threatened too. But the logical conclusion, in this case, is the wrong one.

Imitation is the sincerest form of...

There are so many new literary publishing ventures, I have a hard time keeping up with them all. So I was slow to find out even about the most interesting among them - to wit, the Fifty-Two Stories site, which Harper Perennial launched early this year.

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