Electric Literature reviews "The Waste Land" iPad app.
The Awl breaks down the case of 24-year-old hacktivist Aaron Swartz, who was indicted last July for taking nearly 5 million JSTOR documents off an MIT laptop and releasing them into the public domain.
Melville House is planning to launch what it calls HybridBooks—books with barcodes that, when scanned with smart phones, will allow readers to access supplementary material called "illuminations." Bartleby the Scrivener will come outfitted with 19th-century maps of Wall Street and recipes for ginger nuts (a Melvillean favorite?). According to publisher Dennis Loy Johnson, the hybrid edition of Giacomo Casanova's The Duel will include "a comic essay by Mark Twain on French dueling and an account of a famous duel fought from hot-air balloons."
Courtesy of the Washington Post, a graphic novelization of the debt ceiling crisis.
What's the deal with zombie fiction? "You have to wonder," Terrence Rafferty suggests, "whether our 21st-century fascination with these hungry hordes has something to do with a general anxiety, particularly in the West, about the planet's dwindling resources: a sense that there are too many people out there, with too many urgent needs, and that eventually these encroaching masses, dimly understood but somehow ominous in their collective appetites, will simply consume us."
