Category: Uncategorized
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Borders: A Slightly Premature Elegy
So I used to work at Borders. Two stints, in fact. One at the old mothership on State Street in Ann Arbor, and a second nine years later at the Framingham, MA, store. Both are now gone, and by the looks of things, Borders itself might not last too much longer. I’m thinking of this…
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First Article I Ever Published
Like I said before, I know I’m supposed to hate Google Books, but I’ve never seen this article nor held a copy of the book in my hands (thanks to the author-copy policies of Greenwood Press, which I’m sure have their own perfectly valid reasons for existing). I wrote this in 1998 for the International…
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Tweetcognito
Somebody using the handle Will_Ferrell is now following me on Twitter. Wonder what the odds are that it’s the genuine article, and what sort of sanctions are in place for creating celebrity doppelgangers.
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You Mean All Is Not Lost?
According to the NYT…well, according to the NEA, as quoted and written about in the NYT, more people are reading literature (defined for these purposes as fiction/poetry/drama) for the first time in 26 years. Quoth NEA chair Dana Gioia: “Cultural decline is not inevitable.” Is there an actual turn back in the direction of reading?…
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Skeptical Toward Theory
Paul Kincaid begins his latest Science Fiction Skeptic column at Bookslut with the following: I am, as Adam Roberts would delight in pointing out to me, an amateur of science fiction. That is, in terms of this criticism lark, I am not an academic. This does, however, have its advantages. It means, for example, that…
Crooked House Fictions 