A first-person narrator is allowed to be unreliable. The voice is like a dirty windshield at night in the rain. Even if all you see is glare and blobs, you assume whatever’s out there is real. But the second an omniscient narrator makes a continuity mistake, readers want to kick its ass.
America’s Most Wanted Great American Novelist UPDATE: Franzen Responds
The Editors offer Jonathan Franzen the opportunity to clear his name on a redemptive birdwatching trek through the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains.
The reason that people care about books is because they influence, and sometimes they influence you like an actual life.
I like the idea of nonfiction that isn’t defined by its aboutness.
Dyer’s many digressions are all attempts to describe a relationship to a single piece of art in something approaching fullness.
Our use of the term paranoia is fabulously, very complexly and historically screwed up.
This migration was a singular, watershed moment in American history because it was the first time people who had been legally, forcibly held back for centuries were actually able to make a decision on their own, to leave, and to have the potential to live out their God given gifts.
“A hundred meals and zero shits.” Keith Gessen’s account of his recent O.W.S. related arrest and incarceration has its heart in its bowels.
The Full Stop Doomsday Clock: Rise of the Machines
Following a recent New York Times article about computer generated journalism, the editorial staff at Full Stop has decided to a) advance by one minute the hand of the doomsday clock, and b) start freaking out.
Free Swartz! (In the Event that He is Imprisoned!!)
In what has to be one of the shittiest moments in US copyright/cybertheft/copyleft history (a history comprised mostly of shitty, callow, wrongheaded moments) 24 year old webhead Aaron Swartz was arrested for downloading 4.8 million articles from JStor.