The 19th Annual Havana International Book Fair - Feria Internacional del Libro de La Habana - considered by some to be the most important in Latin America, is scheduled for February 13-20, 2010.The entire island becomes a festival for books. Beginning in Havana's San Carlos de la Cabaña fortress overlooking Havana Bay, the fortress becomes a fairground with numerous expo pavilions and several halls where authors present their books throughout the day. There are also poetry readings, children’s activities, art exhibitions, museum events, and evening concerts. The Book Fair then extends to other cities throughout all fourteen provinces, ending in...
Birth Of The Slow Reading Movement (The Longest Story Ever Told)
A shortage of oddities has compelled Ripley Entertainment, parent of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not, to send great weird hunters across the land in search of strangeness. Seems Ripley’s has been opening so many new museums of curiosities that their collection of bizarreness is being spread thin and needs to be beefed up, according to a recent story in the Wall Street Journal.They need look no further than Opium magazine, Issue 00, The Infinity Issue, featuring The Longest Story Ever Told: Estimated Reading Time: 1,000 Years.The story is nine words long.Before you sign up for a master class at Evelyn...
A Word With You, Please. The Millionth Word.
On June 10, 2009 at 10:22AM in Stratford-on-Avon in the U.K. a new English word was born.“No one said nothin’ ‘bout birthin’ a baby” to me, so at precisely the same time in Los Angeles, 2:22AM, I was asleep with not even a duffel bag at bedside in case I needed to rush to the natal ward, catch this neologism as it exited the womb, and sack out in the neonate department afterward. I like to think of myself as a lexicographical Mother Teresa; all words are my children no matter who sired them, the more humble their beginnings, the...
A Book Club For Hipsters? Solid, Baby!
Sisters and Brothers and Children of the Flip:When, in the course of literary events, it becomes necessary for one peeps to dissolve the bonds that are such a drag due to connection with Squaresville, and to assume it’s a gas to watch the laws of nature and nature's Big Sky Daddy-O pull their coat on respect to the jaw music of mankind, man, it requires that they should lay out the beefs which impel them to Splitsville.It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.Listen, knock me your lobes, ‘cause, DIG!, we hold these riffs to be self-evident,...
Help Wanted: Professional Reader
To provide cogent, erudite and insightful marginalia to digital books and thus help foster social reading. Must be able to read in a crowd and accept potentially constant input and distraction. Digital sociability a must; digital loners, misfits, hermits, screwballs need not apply.As Clive Thompson writes in The Future of Reading in the Digital World in this month’s issue of Wired, “We need to stop thinking about the future of publishing and think instead about the future of reading…Books have a centuries-old tradition of annotation and commentary, ranging from the Talmud and scholarly criticism to book clubs and marginalia.”Bob Stein,...