McSweeney's Is Taking Over the World

(NEWSER) - Dave Eggers, author, editor, and professed lover of print, is hatching a plan to save newspapers. Or at least a modern version of them. Eggers tells the Rumpus that he and his crew at McSweeney's will publish their version of a daily newspaper in September. It will exist for one day only but will include a business plan that can be replicated by others across the country. The general idea: Small paper, high quality. More»

Jennifer Egan's 'Black Box' serialized on Twitter

(NEWSER) - The latest story from a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer will appear in 140-character chunks. The New Yorker is publishing Jennifer Egan's "Black Box" in installments on Twitter, the New York Observer reports. The tweets, which began yesterday , will appear from 8pm to 9pm every day for nine days. They'll also be collected each day at the magazine's Page-Turner blog . The whole story will appear in Monday's science fiction issue of the New Yorker. More»

Novelist refutes magazine, says it was a bad reaction to sleeping pill

(NEWSER) - Philip Roth isn't happy with the Atlantic: A recent piece in the magazine said he suffered from "a 'crack-up' in his mid-50s," and the novelist says that's simply "not true." The Atlantic Wire points out that the episode, "whatever you call it," has been widely discussed in past articles and interviews, but the novelist rejects the term "crack-up." The truth, says Roth, is that he suffered an "adverse reaction" to a sleeping pill called Halcion in the 1980s. More»

'Mother died today' should be 'Today, Maman died': Ryan Bloom

(NEWSER) - Albert Camus' The Stranger opens with the famous—and relatively easy to translate—"Aujourd’hui, maman est morte." It's so easy, in fact, that not a single English translation has gotten it right, writes Ryan Bloom in the New Yorker . He argues that the precise wording of the first line has major implications on the way the reader perceives the narrator and protagonist, Meursault, and finds the translations to-date syntactically and emotionally off-key. Bloom walks readers through the line's evolution: More»

No. 1 is Alexandria, Virginia

(NEWSER) - If you think America's bookworms live in New York or San Francisco, think again. Amazon has released its list of the country's 20 most well-read cities, and they hail from such states as Michigan and Florida, reports Reuters . Top honors goes to Virginia's Alexandria, and though Berkeley and Cambridge do indeed make the top five, they're joined by Ann Arbor and Boulder. Wait til you see who's sixth: More»