“…a West well beyond the dark original author’s darkest imaginings, a West that Hieronymus Bosch might have painted: an Eden falling fast to onrushing gold-maddened men who are glutting it with spilled whiskey and the blood of hideously murdered fellow men, and covered with the alkaline of treachery and moral anarchy … [a] pulsating anti-epic … Under Coover’s hell-hot pen, then, Tom Sawyer consummates the impish boyhood that Twain gave him; he has grown up to be, God help us, the nihilistic Sivilizer, the America-in-chrysalis. Yet Coover’s sardonic revulsion toward the often profligate, prodigal nation his literature has lampooned for 50 years has not yet grown absolute. Amid the chaos and savagery, his Huckleberry Finn still stands as Twain created him: an innocent, abroad in the new world, uncorrupted, truth-telling, the last angel of our better nature.”
–Ron Powers, The New York Times Book Review, January 20, 2017
Alex Reisner explores Book3, the database Meta uses to train generative-AI, and finds Shakespeare, Bukowski, and How to Housebreak Your Dog in 7 Days (among others).
Alison Stine on the lessons of a COVID outbreak at a writing conference.
A study has found that having books in your Zoom background makes you appear more trustworthy.
