In Brief
Muscovites may now download books by Russia's literary giants for free while they wait for the subway. Thanks to an initiative of Moscow Metro, the city's public transportation authority, riders can download ebooks to their smartphones and tablets by scanning a QR code on the subway platform.
Art
The future of e-books, or any electronic text, may be soundtracked. A new experiment in automation is generating music in response to the emotion of words in literature.
Opinion
"Work that fails to enter a canon — literary, historical, or otherwise — tends to languish on the dustier shelves of college libraries. Digitization allows a new generation of scholars to look at them with fresh regard."
Art
People have always loved a good lurid story, the more complicated by family twists and accented by violence the better. Back in the 19th century, thousands of chapbooks were printed in Spain and England that chronicled grisly crimes and romantic intrigue for the public, and since a large part of the
Books
Penguin UK has released ten editions of ten contemporary classics with covers all commissioned from street artists, using photographs documenting the literary-inspired work.
Books
Here is a fun literary experiment: substitute the words ill or illness in Virginia Woolf’s essay “On Being Ill” (1930) with the words hung-over and hangover . It works, right? “Hangover is the great confessional”; “In a hangover words seem to possess a mystic quality”; “Incomprehensibility has an en
Books
MIAMI — Need a good summer read? Maybe you should pick up books from one of these authors.
Art
AWP, or the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (that’s actually AWWP, but we’ll let that slide), is billed as an annual celebration of authors, teachers, writing programs, literary centers and small press publishers. Every year these bibliophile masses descend on a North American city (Chic
Books
Varamo is only the sixth novel by the Argentinian writer César Aira to be made available in English, but the premise already sounds like an Aira-parody: one night in Panama in 1923, a government employee without a literary bone in his body composes a future masterpiece of Central American poetry and
Interview
Written from the perspective of Dr. Gachet, Vincent van Gogh's physician, Carol Wallace's Leaving Van Gogh is the fictional story of the famous painter's final months in the French town of Auvers. Based on 902 letters exchanged between Van Gogh and his family and friends, the novel paints the pictur