Tag: LITERATURE

Ordinarily, we're not crazy about Twitter accounts (or Tumblrs, or blogs) getting book deals. It's a little too IRL for us; plus, maybe, we're kinda jealous. But we're nothing but thrilled for @MayorEmanuel, which landed a deal with Scribner to release a book this summer. In case you don't remember (philistine!), @MayorEmanuel was the surprisingly beautiful, if profanity-laden account of the ...

It sounds like a story line straight out of 'The Simpsons.' For the first time in years, a movie director will soon adapt 'The Great Gatsby' to the silver screen. Except this Gatsby will be in 3-D. And in Australia. Let's just hope that director Baz Lurhmann goes ahead, fully embraces absurdity, and writes in a few car chases. ...

This "garage sale find" (yeah, right...) game, based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's literary classic, is a blast. You take control of Nick Carraway as he hurls his hat at waiters, drunks and gangsters in a quest to track down Gatsby. The game is short, sweet and simple, and filled with NES-style cut scenes that tell the story in a way that should be familiar to anyone who has played an 8-bit RPG. We ...

Author Salman Rushdie has accumulated an impressive array of awards during his illustrious career, but the writer is likely most well known for his novel 'The Satanic Verses,' due to the fiery response it provoked. After the book prompted Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to issue a fatwah, or death decree, against the author, Rushdie lived under police protection for a decade. Rushdie's ...

The Puritans who govern Apple's App Store have struck once again, and this time, have targeted a titan of 20th century literature. Robert Berry, the creator of a Web comic based on James Joyce's seminal novel 'Ulysses,' recently told the New York Times that Apple had forced him to remove "offensive" illustrations from his publication before allowing it for sale as an iPad app. Berry, who ...

All writers want their words to be immortalized in posterity, but poet Christian Bök has some serious issues with his work falling under the sands of time. Bök is planning to inscribe his poetry within the DNA of a tough-as-nails bacterium known as Deinococcus radiodurans so that it will potentially last for billions of years. The bacterium can survive acids, freezing temperatures, ...

There's a load of great tech news happening out there every day, and, unfortunately, we just can't cover it all. Here are a few of the other noteworthy things we saw today on our never-ending journey through the wild, wild Web. In celebration of 'Dante's Inferno,' Wired reimagines other literary classics as 'Grand Theft Auto,' 'Modern Warfare,' and 'Sims'-style games as video games. [From: ...

We will be the first to admit that reading on the iPhone isn't the most pleasant experience in the world. In theory, it's amazing to be able to carry your favorite book on your cell phone -- an ability that products like the 'Classics' iPhone app offers to users. But when the device displays a mere 50 to 75 words at a time (translating to hundreds of screens of text), reading a novel becomes ...

Thank goodness our e-mail addresses have changed since the days of Shakespeare 101, or we'd be getting big, fat "I told you so's" from our college professors. For as many years as he's been studied, scholars have raged about whether or not Shakespeare had collaborators (or snatched some language from playwrights of his day). However, Sir Brian Vickers at the University of London says he can now ...

After successfully redefining journalism as we know it, Twitter-mania has its eyes set on its newest target: the entire canon of Western literature. Sort of. In a forthcoming book titled 'Twitterature,' authors Emmett Rensin and Alexander Aciman survey over 60 classic works, from Goethe to Kerouac, and "twitterize" them, whittling them down to several series of 140-character tweets. The book ...

Aspiring authors, take note. In response to the popularity of Amazon's Kindle and the Sony Reader, a journalism professor from Chicago's Columbia College decided that books on the Net might help out the little guy, too. "Thankfully, the death of print meant discovering something much more valuable: mobile publishing," Professor Dan Sinker wrote on his site, CellStories.net. Sinker (who also, ...

There may not be a more prescient, or dichotomous, living author than Ray Bradbury. The sci-fi writer has foretold of numerous modern gadgets and gizmos; in his classic 1953 novel 'Fahrenheit 451,' he wrote of flat-screen interactive televisions and headphones eerily similar to ear buds. His story 'The Veldt' describes in great detail "Happy-life Homes," a remarkable precursor to technologically ...

digg_url ='http://www.switched.com/2009/04/23/man-writes-400-page-novel-on-cell-phone/'; You know how you spend your commute alternating between sleeping, daydreaming, and refreshing your Facebook feed? Well, Peter Brett does something else: he writes novels... on his smartphone. It's okay, we feel lazy too. Brett wrote the majority of his first novel, "The Warded Man," on his phone during ...

Stored voicemails and text messages can often come back to haunt naive senders, but, in some cases, the saved messages can serve as cherished reminders of departed loved ones. After Motoo Fukuda of Hyogo Prefecture, Japan passed away in 2006 from mesothelioma caused by asbestos exposure, his 65-year-old wife Toshiko began sending heartfelt messages lamenting his absence to the departed man's cell ...

Manhattan's Algonquin Hotel has a long tradition of nurturing the literary-minded -- Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, even Harpo Marx hung out there in its heyday. Keeping up with the times, the folks running the Algonquin today apparently still have literature on their minds, and are offering Amazon's Kindle pre-loaded with a book of their choice for guests of the hotel during their stay. If ...