THE DETECTIVE story is a kind of intellectual game. It is more — it is a sporting event. And for the writing of detective stories there are very definite laws — unwritten, perhaps, but none the less binding; and every respectable and self-respecting concocter of literary mysteries lives up to them. Herewith, then, is a sort Credo, based partly on the practice of all the great writers of detective stories, and partly on the promptings of the honest author's inner conscience. To wit:

Suddenly, every time I walked into a bookstore or read a review, I started noticing similarly breathless subtitles. What had struck me initially as the odd unfortunate decision now began to look like a full-blown trend.

If anybody has more info about this please let me know ! As it is, I really don't know much about this game. I found it at a yard sale. I bought it for 50 cents and went home to try it out. After dusting off my NES for like, 20 minutes I got it working, and jesus. So weird. Apparently it's an unreleased localization of a Japanese cart called "Doki Doki Toshokan: Gatsby no Monogatari", but I haven't found anything about that either. What's left of the manual was just rubberbanded to the cartridge.

IN WHICH NOVELIST David Foster Wallace VISITS THE SET OF DAVID LYNCH'S NEW MOVIE AND FINDS THE DIRECTOR BOTH grandly admirable AND sort of nuts

Imagine a book—in this case the 1934 novel The Street of Crocodiles, a surrealistic set of linked stories by the Polish Holocaust victim Bruno Schulz—whose pages have been cut out to form a latticework of words. The result is a new, much shorter story and a paper sculpture, a remarkable piece of inert, unclickable technology: the anti-Kindle. Reading it is a little like going through an FBI document full of blacked-out passages, except that the excised portions are now holes through which you get glimpses of subsequent text. The format slows your eye down (though it helps if you slightly lift the page you’re on), but the book is so brief that it can still be read in half an hour.

In the face of such odds, merely writing a novel must seem perverse. Self-indulgent, at the very least, if not financial suicide. The question is less whether the novel as a form is dying, or if the internet can offer a lifeline to certain writers. What cries out for explanation is the strange, persistent fact that millions of us spend years attempting something for which we are certain to see little, if any, reward. 

The internet’s most ruinous effect on literacy may not be the obliteration of long-format journalism or drops in hardcover sales; it may be the destruction of the belief that books can be talked and written about endlessly. There are fewer official reviews of novels lately, but there are infinitely more pithily captioned links on Facebook, reader-response posts on Tumblr, punny jokes on Twitter. How depressing, to have a book you just read and loved feel so suddenly passé, to feel—almost immediately—as though you no longer have any claim to your own ideas about it. I started writing this piece when the book came out at the end of July, and I started unwriting it almost immediately thereafter. Zeno’s Paradox 2.0: delete your sentences as you read their approximations elsewhere. How will future fiction work? Will details coalesce into aphorism?

No other jury verdict has had such a profound social impact as the acquittal of Penguin Books in the Lady Chatterley trial. Fifty years on, Geoffrey Robertson QC looks at how it changed Britain's cultural landscape.

Throughout the following interview, which took place over two consecutive afternoons, he showed a readiness to laugh that was pleasantly out of keeping with the quiet of the office. He’s clearly a busy man and by his own admission a reluctant talker, but once serious conversation began I found him focused and forthcoming. He spoke fluently, but with extended pauses between statements, taking great care to give the most accurate answer possible. When the talk turned to jazz or to running marathons, two of his great passions, he could easily have been mistaken for a man twenty years younger, or even for a fifteen-year-old boy.

Normally I don’t mind being out of the pop-cultural loop—I’ve even learned, over the years, to wear my ignorance with a certain musty old-man pride. Given, however, that I am a professional studier of words, my hip-hop blind spot has come to seem indefensible: I am clueless about one of the culture’s most vital fronts of verbal artistry. It would be like an art critic who’s never seen a comic book, or a choreographer who’s never heard of Michael Jackson.

The narrative mode (also known as the mode of narration) is the set of methods the author of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, or musical story uses to convey the plot to the audience. Narration, the process of presenting the narrative, occurs because of the narrative mode. It encompasses several overlapping areas of concern, most importantly narrative point-of-view, which determines through whose perspective the story is viewed; narrative voice, which determines the manner through which the story is communicated to the audience; narrative structure, which determines in what order events are presented; and narrative tense, which determines with what sense of time the story is expressed, whether in the past, present, or future.

"A lavishly entertaining account of a family at war with itself, and a brilliant dissection of the dissatisfactions and disappointments of contemporary American life... Compelling...Freedom, though frequently funny, is ultimately tender: its emotional currency is both the pain and the pleasure that that word implies . . . That it also grapples with a fundamental dilemma of modern middle-class America—namely: Is it really still OK to spend your life asserting your unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness, when the rest of the world is in such a state?. . . The reason to celebrate him is not that he is doing something new but that he is doing something old, presumed dead—and doing it brilliantly. Freedom bids for a place alongside the great achievements of his predecessors, not his contemporaries; it belongs on the same shelf as John Updike’s Rabbit, Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, Philip Roth’s American Pastoral. It is the first Great American Novel of the post-Obama era."

“MY OWN PLAN FOR THE COMING FOURTEEN MONTHS IS TO KNOCK ON DOORS AND STUFF ENVELOPES. MAYBE EVEN TO WEAR A BUTTON. TO TRY TO ACCRETE WITH OTHERS INTO A DEMOGRAPHICALLY SIGNIFICANT MASS. TO TRY EXTRA HARD TO EXERCISE PATIENCE, POLITENESS, AND IMAGINATION ON THOSE WITH WHOM I DISAGREE. ALSO TO FLOSS MORE.”

I get so many emails asking me the authors that influenced me or what I books I recommend, so I decided to list them here. These are not necessarily the “best” books I’ve ever read, but they are the ones that’ve had the most personal impact on me. Each book on this list, I’ve read at least three times:

Fascinating. David Foster Wallace's Literary Interpretation syllabus from Spring '05: http://bit.ly/9nSA7d (via @rogre)

My final reading of my own books occurs when the FedEx man brings the page proofs to be checked. In the case of Cloud Atlas, this was back in 2003, so these days it's not uncommon to meet readers whose knowledge of the book surpasses my own. Cloud Atlas's Wikipedia entry covers the book's more obvious themes and content, so here I'll stick to "The Making Of"-type angles, and a few Roads Not Taken.

The Third Policeman is a novel by Irish author Brian O'Nolan, writing under the pseudonym Flann O'Brien. It was written between 1939 and 1940, but after it initially failed to find a publisher, the author withdrew the manuscript from circulation and claimed he had lost it. At the time of his death in 1966, the book was still unpublished. It was finally published in 1967 by McGibbon & Kee.[1][2]

At Swim-Two-Birds is a 1939 novel by Irish author Brian O'Nolan, writing under the pseudonym Flann O'Brien. It is widely considered to be O'Brien's masterpiece, and one of the most sophisticated examples of metafiction.

RT @GuardianBooks: Jonathan Franzen: 'I must be near the end of my career – people are starting to approve' http://gu.com/p/2jzzm/tw

AUSTIN, Texas—The archive of David Foster Wallace (1962-2008), author of "Infinite Jest" (1996), "The Broom of the System" (1987), "Girl with Curious Hair" (1989) and numerous collections of stories and essays, is now open at the Harry Ransom Center. A finding aid for the collection can be accessed online.

RT @longformorg: "The Unfinished" David Foster Wallace’s struggle to surpass “Infinite Jest": http://nyr.kr/aTJUZa (@NewYorker '09) #lon ...

Beach reads don’t have to be new best sellers or formulaic romances. In fact, summer is the perfect time to dig deep into books, classics and otherwise, you’ve missed. We asked exemplary authors in particular fields to recommend the books that matter most to them—the ones they keep going back to and, in many cases, that made them want to write. Their literary mix tapes, of a sort.

This collection of David Foster Wallace recordings was originally collected by Ryan Walsh in early 2009. This website was built and is maintained by Jordyn Bonds.

“What I know about writing I know from having read the work of the great writers.” More on how-to culture: http://instapaper.com/ztr0me01V

This comic describes some of the reasons why I love Thomas Pynchon: http://isthistomorrow.com/archive/pynchon.html

"Hang your favorite book on the wall with the complete text, arranged to depict a memorable scene from the book!" http://postertext.com/

If there is such a thing as a “right way” and a “wrong way” to read books, then my high school approach to Animal Farm & Nineteen Eighty-Four would have been the latter. But that was because I did not know exactly how these books were shaped by their times, and how contemporary audiences would have reacted to them. We never heard about Orwell’s influences, such as Arthur Koestler, Yevgeny Zamyatin, or James Burnham, because they are not part of the literary canon. We never learned about the show trials in Moscow or the Spanish Civil War, either, because that was meant for history class, not English. And any textual analysis that smacked too much of politics was strictly out of bounds: I did not understand that the concept of “Ingsoc” was supposed to be a satire of Nazism, whereby fascism advanced under a socialist veneer, until much later. In short, I could not have known what Orwell intended his works to be.

Janet Fitch is the author of "White Oleander" and "Paint it Black," and she teaches writing at USC. It seems like every time I run into her at a reading, she introduces one or two or more of her students who she has encouraged to come along, people whose work she praises. This enthusiastic engagement makes her, well, nicer than many writing teachers, and that niceness might be why she's posted a list of 10 writing tips that can help almost anyone on her blog. But the list shows that just because she's nice, she's no pushover in the classroom.

dfw's archive is taking shape.

Michael Greenberg discusses JD Salinger, comparing his claustrophobic NY fiction to the open-road Romanticism of the beats, and viewing Holden Caulfield as 'instinctively postmodernist'.

I've never (knowingly) read anything by Neil Gaiman, and was mostly unaware of his level of fame until I read this and did some subsequent Googling. It's not such a shock these days to hear of an author connecting with his/her audience via the internet; but to see Gaiman do it with no small amount of honesty and integrity is pleasing.

"Listen online to feature-length interviews with the greatest American writers from 1939 to the present."

"With the death of JD Salinger last week, a remarkable era in US literature came to its end. Mark Lawson reflects on the passing of an unrivalled generation."

"J. D. Salinger, who was thought at one time to be the most important American writer to emerge since World War II but who then turned his back on success and adulation, becoming the Garbo of letters, famous for not wanting to be famous, died on Wednesday at his home in Cornish, N.H., where he had lived in seclusion for more than 50 years. He was 91."

"His syllabus was wonderful -- and yes, it had footnotes. He seemed to be chewing tobacco and spitting it into a mug as he talked about why this was going to be a class where we as writers improve our ability to engage a reader who has zero interest in our opinions or emotions. He wore big black shoes, the laces seemed undone, and had a bandanna on his head."

"n many ways, the men who made The Godfather—director Francis Ford Coppola, producer Al Ruddy, Paramount executives Robert Evans and Peter Bart, and Gulf & Western boss Charles Bluhdorn—were as ruthless as the gangsters in Mario Puzo’s blockbuster. After violent disputes over the casting of Marlon Brando and Al Pacino, they tangled with the real-life Mob, which didn’t want the movie made at all. The author recalls how the clash of Hollywood sharks, Mafia kingpins, and cinematic geniuses shaped a Hollywood masterpiece."

Nine peers pay tribute with a talk or essay.

"There’s no wrong way to read Infinite Jest: front-to-back, upside-down, cut in half, or skipping around. But here are a few tips for the Infinite Jester."

Short story by David Foster Wallace.

"When daddy was hanging a door. Exceedingly short fiction from the author of Infinite Jest."

"David Foster Wallace was a big part of why I wanted to work at Little, Brown and Company. It was just a strange twist of fortune that the production people there also get to art direct the books' interiors. And another strange twist that I had a book design background. When Wallace published Oblivion, I decided to design it myself."

"The author David Foster Wallace '85, a towering figure in modern literature, died on Sept. 12. Best known for his novel Infinite Jest, Wallace received an honorary degree from Amherst in 1999. That year, Amherst magazine writer Stacey Schmeidel interviewed Wallace by mail. The feature-length Q & A, titled "Brief Interview With a Five Draft Man," ran in the Spring 1999 issue of the magazine, and is reprinted here."

"The sadness over Wallace’s death was also connected to a feeling that, for all his outpouring of words, he died with his work incomplete. Wallace, at least, never felt that he had hit his target. His goal had been to show readers how to live a fulfilled, meaningful life. “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being,” he once said."

"He was the greatest writer of his generation - and also its most tormented. In the wake of his tragic suicide, his friends and family reveal the lifelong struggle of a beautiful mind."

Lovely piece by Robert McCrum on 1984 and the final years of George Orwell.

The only problem is: how long must we wait for a translation?