paper trail

Which is dead: the novel or Twitter?

Hassan Blasim

The novel is dead (again). It will still be “be written and read,” Will Self argues in the the Guardian, “but it will be an art form on a par with easel painting or classical music: confined to a defined social and demographic group, requiring a degree of subsidy, a subject for historical scholarship rather than public discourse.”

Shares of Twitter ended on Friday at $39.01, and could drop toward $30. But it’s still over-priced, Reuters points out.

An interview with Hassan Blasim, author of The Corpse Exhibition, a collection of stories about Iraq. “I still write in literary Arabic but I try to rid it of the rhetoric, the symbolism, and the stuff that ordinary people don’t understand,” Blasim says of his style.

The new magazine Modern Farmer is getting a lot of attention after winning a National Magazine Award.

What was it like having Philip Roth as a professor?