As Al Jazeera demands the release of its four journalists detained in Egypt, the Committee to Protect Journalists has released a grim accounting of the year, declaring Egypt, Syria, and Iraq the most deadly nations in the world for the press. According to the report, seventy journalists have been killed for their work in 2013. Twenty-five more deaths are still under investigation.
“The Great American Novel—always capitalized, like the United States of America itself—has to be a book that contains and explains the whole country,” writes Adam Kirsch in a review of Lawrence Buell’s The Dream of the Great American Novel. Surely, books such as Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom fit the script. But what about Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, which covers many of the same themes as Faulker’s masterpiece, outsold it by a factor of fifty to one, but hardly qualifies as an uncontested classic of American letters?
In the meantime, the Millions estimates that there are currently some 250,000 novelists at work in America.
The man behind the New York Times Magazine’s most striking cover designs is leaving, and moving to Apple.
Soon to be spun off of Time Warner, Time Inc. is planning to strike out on its own.
According to a federal judge in Chicago, Sherlock Holmes has tumbled out of copyright protection and into the public domain.
