Blindness 'Fascinating' But Difficult to Watch

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»

Will Smith, Tommy Lee Jones return for alien flick

(NEWSER) - Sure, no one was that desperate for a Men in Black 3—but it's actually a pretty good summer movie. Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones are back defending the planet from aliens, and this time, Josh Brolin's along for the ride as a young Jones.

• The movie "turns out to be so much fun," writes AO Scott in the New York Times . While it "carefully fulfills its blockbuster imperatives—with chases and explosions and elaborately contrived plot twists—it swerves into some marvelously silly, unexpectedly witty, and genuinely fresh territory."

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»