“I swear to God, I can’t read a book unless it has miniature numbered sections. I exaggerate, but only slightly.” -David Shields
Go read the full interview at Bookslut.
Stories for the searchers
Ryan Boudinot has a new project. It’s called Found and Lost, and it’s stories distributed to readers through geocaches. Here’s a description of the stories:
“Found and Lost” is a series of interlinked short stories. Each story focuses on a main character who, in the course of the story, finds something and loses something else. The stories are set in various settings and time periods. The stories are connected to one another like links in a chain. For instance, Betty finds a cell phone and loses a framed butterfly. In another story, Juan finds the framed butterfly and loses his wallet. In another story, a man finds Juan’s wallet and loses his glass eye. The stories are linked in a circle, so that the “last” story involves someone who loses something that the “first” person finds.
Ryan has always approached technology in interesting ways—both in his writing and in the way he gets his writing to people. I like this idea a lot. I’m in favor of people giving work away, but I like that Ryan has made a challenge out of it.
Do any of you do this? This geocaching thing? Would you work for a good story? Would you search for one, given the chance?
SALINGER DEAD
portrait of the artist in the rye
Sad news. J.D. Salinger has died. Feel free to speculate on the obvious (and I don’t mean cause of death)…
R.I.P. Howard Zinn
Gawker is reporting, via Boston.com, that Howard Zinn has died of a heart attack. He was 87. From the Boston.com piece-
For Dr. Zinn, activism was a natural extension of the revisionist brand of history he taught. Dr. Zinn’s best-known book, “A People’s History of the United States” (1980), had for its heroes not the Founding Fathers — many of them slaveholders and deeply attached to the status quo, as Dr. Zinn was quick to point out — but rather the farmers of Shays’ Rebellion and the union organizers of the 1930s.As he wrote in his autobiography, “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train” (1994), “From the start, my teaching was infused with my own history. I would try to be fair to other points of view, but I wanted more than ‘objectivity’; I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it. This, of course, was a recipe for trouble.”
Matthew Simmons—
Just heard from Victoria at Underland: Brian Evenson’s Last Days won the American Library Association Horror Novel of the Year Award.
14
Matthew Simmons—
Brandon Scott Gorrell is moving somewhere. He didn’t tell me where. Wherever he is moving, he will not be taking his books. You can buy his books. Cheap. Buy cheap books.
Sean Lovelace—
Small Press Distribution 2009 best seller fiction list released. Why not use this as a reading list for 2010?