crime fiction

Not My Type — Paul Shaw really doesn’t like Just My Type by Simon Garfield:

This is the second time I have tried to write a review of Just My Type. It is a frustrating book—warm and friendly on the surface but obnoxious underneath. The first time, I methodically tore it to pieces in my blue-pencil style, pointing out its deficiencies in niggling detail. When I was done, I felt satisfied but also uncomfortable. Did Simon Garfield really deserve such a bashing? After all, the book is full of fascinating stories and odd trivia about type, and the author has a charming, breezy style that makes each bit of typographic arcana easy to swallow. Is it really that bad? Yes, it is.

Ouch.

“I just call them books” — Robert Birnbaum interviews author John Banville for The Morning News:

I don’t like this ghettoization of books. When I started publishing fiction it is was good, not so good, bad, you know. Now there is a ghetto for crime fiction. I would like to have books listed alphabetically—no distinction.

And finally…

Control+A / Control+ C / Control+V  – A provocative excerpt from Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age by Kenneth Goldsmith in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

There’s been an explosion of writers employing strategies of copying and appropriation over the past few years, with the computer encouraging writers to mimic its workings. When cutting and pasting are integral to the writing process, it would be mad to imagine that writers wouldn’t exploit these functions in extreme ways that weren’t intended by their creators… The previous forms of borrowing in literature, collage, and pastiche—taking a word from here, a sentence from there—were developed based on the amount of labor involved. Having to manually retype or hand-copy an entire book on a typewriter is one thing; cutting and pasting an entire book with three keystrokes—select all / copy / paste—is another.

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