"Velocity, depth, breadth. These are the dimensions we can add to books, that are the gifts of a digital age, not gimmicks, glossy presentation and media-catching stunts. The text works. It stands and speaks for itself. It is not what we need to change." Yes, yes, yes, this, a hundred times over.

"Good art is a kind of magic. It does magical things for both artist and audience. We can have long polysyllabic arguments about how to describe the way this magic works, but the plain fact is that good art is magical and precious and cool. It’s hard to try and make good art, and it seems to me wholly reasonable that good artists should be concerned with their work’s cultural reception." Oh, this.

"I thoroughly enjoy the more real time nature of these diary fragments popping up among my friends’ updates. It’s easy to picture @samuelpepys conducting his business and pleasure, travelling around London — from his home near the Tower of London to Deptford to Westminster — when he’s updating you on his progress during the day." Phil on the joy of small updates from things that aren't (quite) people.

"Now that suburban housewives in Missouri are letting their thoughts be known via Twitter, it's as if writing itself is thought to be under attack, invaded from all sides by the unwashed masses whose thoughts have not been sanctioned as Literature™. In many ways, I'm reminded of Truman Capote's infamous put-down of Jack Kerouac: "That's not writing, it's typing.""

"As I tried to unravel Braid’s interstitial text I realized that solving the puzzles and understanding the text required very similar approaches. Their concealed machinations and thematic ambiguities are teased out using the same mental processes, and are part of the same overarching search for meaning. In a way, I was “reading” everything in the game. It’s not the unification of narrative and gameplay that we’ve come to expect, but it’s a refreshing and effective one." Dan Bruno has an interesting perspective on Braid; not sure I agree with it entirely, but the feelings he describes are certainly familiar.

"Tattoos from books, poetry, music, and other sources." As with all tattoos: some are misspelt, some are a bit blah, some are beautiful.

"Wells has received insufficient credit as a writer of rhythmic, incantatory prose, long-breath paragraphs to cut against his tight journalistic reportage. The War of the Worlds makes the journey from sensationalist incident to moral parable. Wells predicts an era when fiction and documentary will be inseparable." Fantastic writing from Iain Sinclair on HG Wells.

2008 Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest results. Excellent, as usual.

"It's not quite a game, and while it does have branching, it doesn't allow the reader to affect the outcome of story - only their own experience of it." Adrian Hon on writing something better than Choose-Your-Own-Adventure. Some lovely visible thinking.

"...a suspiciously high proportion of my UNIX colleagues had already developed, in some prior career, a comfort and fluency with text and printed words. They were adept readers and writers, and UNIX played handily to those strengths."

"Literature is inescapably intertwined with our everyday environment. By making this visible, we can encourage and spread it, and send it in new and exciting directions."

"To conflate fantasy with immaturity is a rather sizeable error. Rational yet non-intellectual, moral yet inexplicit, symbolic not allegorical, fantasy is not primitive but primary." Ursula le Guin on fine form in the NS.

[Murukami] wrote the initial chapters in English, before translating them into Japanese. "I didn't know how to write fiction, so I tried writing in English because my vocabulary was limited. I knew too many words in Japanese. It was too heavy." Good inter