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Tag: Literature

  • Harper Lee Agrees to Digital “To Kill a Mockingbird”

    To Kill a Mockingbird will live on. The Pulitzer Prize winning novel written by Harper Lee was one of the long-standing holdouts of the digital age. Now the author, who hasn’t written a major work in more than 50 years, has agreed to allow one of the most esteemed novels in literary history to be released electronically.

    The decision was announced by Lee’s publisher HarperCollins yesterday, the day of the reclusive author’s 88th birthday. Lee said in a rare public statement, “I’m still old-fashioned. I love dusty old books and libraries. This is Mockingbird for a new generation.”

    The popular novel is read by almost every student in the United States by the time they graduate from middle school. As educational institutions transition from print to digital, Lee’s decision will ensure that teenagers decades from now will have the opportunity to experience one of the richest coming-of-age novels in American Literature. The novel is told through the eyes of the young protagonist Scout as she deals with the issues of racial injustice during the Jim Crow era of the south in the 1930s.

    Lee published To Kill a Mockingbird in 1960. It was the only novel that she ever wrote. The book has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide and became an Oscar winning film starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in 1962. Additionally, it is often cited as one of the greatest novels ever written. Joel Rickett, deputy editor of The Bookseller Magazine, wrote about the book’s influence on its readers, “To Kill a Mockingbird is a book that many people read at school or during their formative years. It is a hugely powerful and political book which has formed many a conscience. As a teenager a book like that can be more profound than reading a book in your 40s and 50s.”

    The digital versions of To Kill a Mockingbird will be available on July 8.

    Image via YouTube Screenshot

  • John Steinbeck’s 112th Birthday Celebrated With Google Doodle

    Google is celebrating the works of author John Steinbeck with a doodle today, which would have been his 112th birthday. He died in 1968 at the age of 66 from heart disease and congestive heart failure.

    Steinbeck is one of the most celebrated authors in American history, and his works are often required reading in schools.

    Among Steinbeck’s most well-known works are Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, Cannery Row, The Pearl, East of Eden, The Winter of Our Discontent, and Travels with Charley: In Search of America. Other titles include Cup of Gold, The Pastures of Heaven, The Red Pony, To a God Unknown, Tortilla Flat, In Dubious Battle, The Long Valley, The Forgotten Village, Seas of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research, The Moon is Down, Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team, The Wayward Bus, A Russian Journal, Burning Bright, The Log from the Sea of Cortez, Sweet Thursday, The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication, Once There Was A War, and America and Americans.

    A number of these titles were turned into movies.

    The doodle is accompanied by five pieces of artwork, each representing one of Steinbeck’s works:

    Grapes of Wrath

    Cannery Row

    Of Mice and Men

    Each year, the Steinbeck Festival is held at the National Steinbeck Center in his hometown of Salinas, California. This year, in early May, it will celebrate the 75th anniversary of The Grapes of Wrath.

    “In 2014, the National Steinbeck Center will celebrate the 75th anniversary of The Grapes of Wrath by convening a national dialogue, seeking out the experiences of individual Americans today and bringing them into the light,” the Center says on its website. “Steinbeck told stories of the human capacity to overcome bleak circumstances. At the National Steinbeck Center, we work every day to continue this legacy and highlight the humanity in each of our stories.”

    Steinbeck sits atop a rock in a new statue – The Cannery Row Monument – that was uncovered this week in Steinbeck Plaza in Monterey. His friend Ed Ricketts appears at the bottom.

    Images via Google, Instagram

  • Anne Frank Literature: 265 Books Destroyed in Tokyo

    Since January, a vandal has been making the rounds, ripping pages out of Anne Frank books in libraries across Tokyo, Japan.

    Police investigators have counted a total of 265 damaged books.

    One of the most renowned, historical books of the Holocaust victim includes The Diary of a Young Girl, which details a firsthand account of Anne Frank’s experience.

    Evidence has shown that dozen of pages were ripped out of the book. Investigators believe that the books may have been searched in the librarian database.

    One library has now relocated their copies in a safe area behind the counter of the checkout area.

    There is reportedly no motive behind the vandalism, or is there?(image)

    The Associated Press implied that the former relationship between Germany and Japan could be the reason why the “paper-reaper” is targeting Anne Frank literature.

    Japan and Nazi Germany were allies in World War II, and though Holocaust denial has occurred in Japan at times, the motive for damaging the Anne Frank books is unclear. 

    According to BBC News, Japan has no history of anti-Semitism. Associate Dean Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, which is a Jewish rights organization, believes otherwise.

    “The geographic scope of these incidents strongly suggest an organized effort to denigrate the memory of the most famous of the 1.5 million Jewish children murdered by the Nazis in the World War Two Holocaust,” he told BBC.

    Literature about Anne Frank has been popular among the Japanese community for years. Historians from Israel have confirmed that young adults in Japan are more receptive towards the Anne Frank story than any other age group.

    The The Diary of a Young Girl was first translated in 1952 and became a bestseller in Japan a year later. The country reportedly ranks second to the United States the number of copies sold.

    Images via YouTube

  • J.K. Rowling Will Publish New Novel Under Pseudonym This Summer

    After the success of her first adult-themed book under a different name, J.K. Rowling has decided to publish a new book under her pseudonym. Rowling released her first novel under the name Robert Gailbraith in 2013, and will be publishing its sequel later this year.

    J.K. Rowling’s last book, The Cuckoo’s Calling, is a murder mystery, and the upcoming The Silkworm, will follow the same character in their adventures as a private investigator.

    The author of the new book will be listed as Robert Gailbraith, and while her alter-ego was kept a secret from most people, it was finally revealed to the public in July of last year.

    She did not want anyone to know, and was crushed when she found out about what happened. In a statement she made at the time, the author said “A tiny number of people knew my pseudonym, and it has not been pleasant to wonder for days how a woman whom I had never heard of prior to Sunday night could have found out something that many of my oldest friends did not know. To say that I am disappointed is an understatement.”

    However, the book went mostly unnoticed until it was revealed that Robert Gailbraith was in fact J.K. Rowling, which could have been a good thing for her in the long run. The novel became a bestseller instantly when fans learned that Rowling had written it, and it is likely that her next book will be able to do the same immediately.

    J.K. Rowling’s follow up to The Cuckoo’s Calling will be her second book published under the new name. In addition to Harry Potter, she also wrote The Casual Vacancy, which was also a bestseller. Rowling is also working on a play that will serve as a prequel to the events that took place during the Harry Potter books.

    The plot will center on novelist Owen Quine, who goes missing, and his wife calls a detective. Detective Cormoran Strike discovers that her husband has just completed a manuscript featuring poisonous pen portraits of almost everyone he knows. Quine is then discovered dead, and the tale turns into a race against time to understand the motivation of a ruthless killer.

    J.K. Rowling’s next novel, The Silkworm, is set to be released in June. It will be published on June 19th in Britain, and will make it to the United States on June 24th.

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • Sherlock Holmes Is Now Officially Public Domain

    After many years of being a beloved book series, and recently being turned into popular films, the character of Sherlock Holmes is officially public domain. This allows authors from the United States to re-imagine the classic tales of the beloved British detective.

    Before now, Sherlock Holmes has been adapted into films as well as popular television shows such as Sherlock and Elementary, but there will now be an opportunity for Sherlock Holmes to emerge through the medium of literature again.

    The Sherlock Holmes novels were written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and were first introduced in 1887. The books centered on Sherlock Holmes, a British detective who is accompanied by his sidekick Watson, and the many adventures that the two of them go on.

    Sherlock Holmes entered public domain in Britain years ago. However, due to a US copyright law protecting 10 short stories in the vast Holmes collection, the descendants of author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were able to retain intellectual property rights in the United States.

    The lawsuit was brought on by Leslie Klinger, an author, editor, and Sherlock Holmes expert. Klinger reported being threatened by the Doyle estate, but she fought the case, claiming that most of the stories and characters in the Holmes canon were old enough that they belonged in the public domain.

    There has been a resurgence in the popularity of Sherlock Holmes due to the new films starring Robert Downey Jr., while the BBC’s production Sherlock has always gained a great amount of popularity that stretches to audiences in the United States as well.

    The Conan Doyle estate claimed that Holmes and his partner Watson were continually developed that the copyright should extend to the characters themselves in addition to the 10 short stories.

    However, a judge recently denied that claim and Judge Ruben Castillo ruled that Sherlock Holmes shall be public domain when saying “The effect of adopting Conan Doyle’s position would be to extend impermissibly the copyright of certain character elements of Holmes and Watson beyond their statutory period.”

    In the ruling, he concluded that only the story elements from the 10 short stories published after 1923 shall be protected, and that everything else in the Sherlock Holmes canon is free for public use.

    After being published in 1887, the character of Sherlock Holmes has finally become public domain in the United States. As popularity is rising with the beloved detective again, fans are likely to see some new books featuring the detective in the near future.

    Image via Facebook

  • J.D. Salinger Stories Are Leaked Online

    J.D. Salinger Stories Are Leaked Online

    Three unpublished stories by the late reclusive author J.D. Salinger were leaked online this week, sending the literary world into a frenzy. Apparently Thanksgiving got a little bit busier as people scrambled to get their hands on a copy of the manuscript and verify whether the stories were indeed penned by Salinger.

    The story of the manuscript leak was first reported on Reddit. The manuscript, which is titled Three Stories, includes the following stories: The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls, Paula, and Birthday Boy. The first of the stories is the one that has people talking the most because it appears to be a prequel to Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.

    According to Buzzfeed, the source of the leak was an eBay auction that sold a copy of an unauthorized copy of the manuscript containing the three Salinger stories. The copy sold for $110 back in September, and the stories began popping up around the Internet yesterday. The manuscript is available on Imgur and Mediafire.

    Now, for the big question–are the stories legit? According to J.D. Salinger scholar Kenneth Slawenski the answer is “yes.” Slawenski, the author of J.D. Salinger: A Life told Buzzfeed that the stories are real based on his prior reading of the manuscripts, which aren’t (or weren’t) available to the general public. “While I do quibble with the ethics (or lack of ethics) in posting the Salinger stories, they look to be true transcripts of the originals and match my own copies,” Slawenski said.

    David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times Book Critic, has also verified that two of the stories are real: “I’ve never read The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls: It’s part of a collection of Salinger material at the Princeton University Library and available only to scholars who are supervised as they read. I have read the other two stories, however, at the University of Texas’ Ransom Center, and the versions of them in Three Stories are the real deal.”

    Now that the stories have been verified, this will give J.D. Salinger fans a taste of what is to come in a couple of years. Salinger’s estate plans to publish five books starting from 2015 through 2020. The books reportedly include a collection of short stories that contain recurring character Seymour Glass as well as a short story that follows up on Holden Caulfield.

    As you can see from the Twitter posts below, some people are really freaking out over the J.D. Salinger stories being leaked:

    [Image via Imgur]

  • Charlotte Zolotow, Popular Author and Editor, Dies

    Charlotte Zolotow the famed literary icon died on Tuesday in her Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, home. She was known for her spunky independence as shown from the following quote, “I am really writing for myself.” The 98-year-old writer and editor established herself as a literary innovator where she championed difficult issues previously not presented to youth.

    Her popular 1972 work titled William’s Doll exposed children to gender mores where the young boy in the story actively desires a doll, much to the dismay of his father. HarperCollins Publishers describes the book as: “More than anything, William wants a doll. “Don’t be a creep,” says his brother. “Sissy, sissy,” chants the boy next door. Then one day someone really understands William’s wish, and makes it easy for others to understand, too.”

    The popular book was even made into a song for the album titled Free to Be…You and Me.

    (image)

    As an editor, Zolotow worked for Harper & Row, which is now HarperCollins Publishers. During her employment with the powerhouse company, Zolotow published Dance On My Grave by Aidan Chambers, which was the first young adult novel to reference homosexuality.

    Zolotow released many additional beloved children’s stories including: Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present, My Grandson Lew, The Park Book, and Do You Know What I’ll Do? to name a few.

    The established writer points to her own difficulties as a youth where she moved in-and-out of school frequently and felt distanced due to her own sickness (scoliosis) that caused her to wear a back brace. Her own tribulations with meandering through childhood and feeling the isolation innate in the age group helped influence the sympathetic tone of her work where she sought to guide children through difficult experiences by showing a unique level of understanding.

    [Images Via HarperCollins Publishers]

  • Doris Lessing, Nobel Prize Winning Author, Dies At Age 94

    Dori Lessing, a Nobel Prize winning author, has died. She was 94, and perhaps most well-known for her novel The Golden Notebook.

    Her books were known to reflect her journeys across the former British empire. She was born Doris May Tayler in 1919 in Persia, what is now Iran.

    Her travels certainly helped shaped her writing, and she also moved to Zimbabwe, at the age of 5, and lived there until the age of 29.

    As she lived a long life, Lessing enjoyed a successful career, and one that included winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 2007.

    She died in her home of London, England, and her career stretched from 1950-2008. In addition to being a successful novelist, Lessing was also a poet, playwright, biographer, and short story writer. She moved to Britain at the age of 30, after becoming disillusioned with the communist movement.

    Lessing wrote with the well-known publishing company Harper Collins. Nicholas Pearson, her editor said of her passing “Doris has been called a visionary and, to be in her company, which was a privilege I had as her editor towards the end of her writing life, was to experience something of that. Even in very old age she was always intellectually restless, reinventing herself, curious about the changing world around us, always completely inspirational. We’ll miss her hugely.”

    At the time that she was awarded her Nobel Prize, she said that she was not surprised, and gave a bit of an odd response when saying “I’m 88 years old and they can’t give the Nobel to someone who’s dead, so I think they were probably thinking they’d probably better give it to me now before I’ve popped off.” However, we all know that kind of thing can happen, and actors often receive Oscar seemingly for the same reason, some would argue.

    Lessing’s famous work, The Golden Notebook, was published in 1962, and centered around Anna Wulf, who uses four notebooks to bring together the separate parts of her disintegrating life. In addition, she has written over 55 works of fiction, opera, nonfiction, and poetry.

    Doris Lessing died peacefully, and while her family has requested her privacy, the exact cause of death is still unknown.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZS01_jB83yY

    Image via Youtube

  • Doris Lessing, 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature Winner, Dies at Age 94

    Prolific writer, Doris Lessing, died at the age of 94 this morning at her home in London. Lessing was the winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature, making her only the 11th female to win the honor.

    Known for her wit and outspoken nature, Lessing was 88 when she won the Nobel Prize in 2007 for her life’s work, making her the oldest writer to receive the award. Some of her best-known works include The Golden Notebook, Memoirs of a Survivor and The Summer Before the Dark.

    Born in 1919 in Persia (now Iran,) Lessing and her family moved to what is now known as Zimbabwe in 1925 with the unsuccessful hopes of making a fortune farming maize. Lessing described her childhood as painful and unhappy, which she often attributed to her success as a fiction writer.

    “Yes, I think that is true. Though it wasn’t apparent to me then. Of course, I wasn’t thinking in terms of being a writer then – I was just thinking about how to escape, all the time.”

    Lessing wrote her debut novel The Grass is Singing in 1950, and her successful The Golden Notebook in 1962, which the Swedish Academy hailed as “a pioneering work” that “belongs to the handful of books that informed the 20th Century view of the male-female relationship”.

    Fans on Twitter paid tribute to the writing pioneer.

    The content of Lessing’s works is extremely varied. While some novels are semi-biographical and told of life in Africa, others are psychological thrillers. She also penned science fiction novels.

    Lessing is survived by her daughter, Jean, and granddaughters Anna and Susannah.

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • Man Booker Prize: Eleanor Catton Wins The Award

    The Man Booker Prize of 2013 was awarded to Eleanor Catton. Catton is a lives in New Zealand, and only 28 years old. She was born in Canada, but moved to New Zealand at the age of 6. This makes her the youngest author to ever win the award, which is the highest literary honor to receive in Great Britain. In addition to being the youngest author to be awarded the prize, the book also sets a record of being the longest book to win the award, at 832 pages.

    Each year, a different author’s work is awarded for their work in fiction, and this year the award went to The Luminaries, Catton’s latest book, which was published in September of 2013. She was awarded the prize today, and it was presented to her by Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall. She has previously written one other novel, The Rehearsal.

    The Luminaries is set during New Zealand’s gold rush, and is described as a layered murder mystery, centered around a group of men with intertwined fates. Other nominees for this year’s award included A Tale For The Time Being by Ruth Ozeki, Harvest by Jim Crace, The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahir, The Testament of Mary by Colm Toibin, and We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo.

    Last year’s prize went to Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel. The winner is selected each by the judging panel on the day of the ceremony. This year’s ceremony was a momentous occasion because it marks the last year before the award is opened to entries from the United States and beyond. Just a month ago, it was announced that the Booker Prize Foundation would be open to all novels written in English and published in Britain, regardless of the author’s nationality, finally letting Americans in on the glory as well.

    There is only one other author from New Zealand to win the award, Keri Hulme, who won in 1985 for her novel The Bone People. During her speech when she accepted the award, Eleanor Catton thanked her publishers for executing the “elegant balance between making art and making money.” She was stunned at the announcement that she won, calling her lengthy and complex novel, a “publisher’s nightmare.”

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iUMQUfEe_o

    Image via Youtube

  • Thug Notes Tackles Catcher in the Rye and the World of Fake-Ass Adults

    Continuing his quest to become the best classic literature discussion channel on YouTube, Sparky Sweets (PhD) has taken on J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye in the latest installment of Thug Notes.

    “So when Holden preaching about the glass cases up in the museum, what he really saying is that he don’t wanna join the ranks of them fake ass adults.”

    Truth, Sparky. Truth.

  • 1984, As Explained by Thug Notes’ Sparky Sweets, PhD

    Sparky Sweets, PhD, is back you guys. As promised, the latest round of Thug Notes (Classic literature, original gangster) tackles George Orwell’s seminal classic 1984.

    “Yo, you know what else is wack? As the party recreates reality, eventually all your individual qualities get kicked straight to the curb. How’s a brother gonna know he exists if all he be is what the government tells him he be?”

    Couldn’t have said it better myself.

    [Thug Notes]

  • Meet Thug Notes, the Best Classic Literature Discussion on YouTube

    “Jem’s crippled ass is a metaphor for America’s jacked-up justice system. Jem f*ckin’ up his arm so young is one of them synecdoches for a country that was born with backward-ass ideas. Now, that sh*t might heal, but it gonna leave a disablin’ scar on the nation, and ain’t no amount of cocoa butter gonna make that sh*t go away.”

    That’s the kind of deep analysis you’ll find in Thug Notes – “Classic literature, original gangster.”

    Sparky Sweets puts his spin on some of our best-loved classics, from Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s like cliff notes, but a whole lot better.

    He’s just getting started, so check out his first three thug notes below:

    According to Sparky Sweets, we can expect a breakdown of Orwell’s 1984 to drop pretty soon. Now that I’m excited about.

  • Brothers Grimm Get A Google Doodle Shout Out

    As previously reported, Google was running a doodle for “Grimm’s Fairy Tales” in parts of the world where Thursday came sooner than it does here in the U.S. Interestingly, now that the doodle has made its way to our neck of the woods, the query with which Google populates the search box, is “Brothers Grimm”.

    There do not appear to be any changes to the doodle itself, which is animated, and depicts the story of Little Red Riding Hood:

    As I pointed out in a previous article, the “Grimm’s Fairy Tales” doodle highlighted Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and now we get to see Google’s Knowledge Graph results for Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, otherwise known as the Brothers Grimm. From Google’s “Knowledge Panel” on the brothers (Wikipedia, really), we learn that they were German academics, linguists, cultural researchers, and authors who together collected folklore.

    Google’s Knowledge Graph is also good at recognizing the Terry Gilliam film The Brothers Grimm, which starred Heath Ledger and Matt Damon. A simple click, and the entire SERP changes to reflect the movie, showing the real power of the Knowledge Graph – helping searchers find what they’re really looking for (even it if is inaccurate from time to time).

  • The Twitter Fiction Festival Is About to Start Choosing Participants

    Last month we told you about The Twitter Fiction Festival, the social media company’s foray into the world of experimental fiction.

    Today, they’ve announced the panel of judges and have also reminded possible participants that they only have a couple of days to submit their ideas.

    If you want to submit your idea for a new fiction experience that utilizes the Twitter platform, you must submit your idea to Twitter by Thursday, November 15th.

    Here is your just-announced panel of idea judges:

    Ben Marcus‘ most recent book is The Flame Alphabet. His stories have appeared in Harper’s, Conjunctions, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review. He teaches at Columbia University.

    Emily Raboteau is the author of the critically acclaimed novel, The Professor’s Daughter, and the forthcoming Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora. Her fiction and essays have regularly appeared in the Best American series. Raboteau also teaches creative writing at City College, in Harlem.

    Lee Ellis (@lhe2103) is the Assistant Fiction Editor at The New Yorker. For the magazine he has edited Michael Ondaatje, Paul La Farge, and William Gibson, among others. He is the recipient of The Henfield Award at Columbia University, where he completed his MFA in fiction.

    Meg Waite Clayton (@megwclayton) is the nationally bestselling author of four novels: The Four Ms. Bradwells, The Wednesday Sisters, the Bellwether Prize finalist The Language of Light, and the forthcoming The Wednesday Daughters.

    Ryan Chapman (@chapmanchapman) is the marketing director for The Penguin Press. His recent campaigns have been for books like Zadie Smith’s NW, Nate Silver’s The Signal and The Noise, and Thomas Pynchon’s work in e-book format.

    Sean McDonald (@neverrockfila) is Executive Editor of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

    Teju Cole (@tejucole) is currently Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College. His novel Open City won the PEN/Hemingway Award. “Small fates,” his Twitter storytelling project, has been featured in the New Yorker and other magazines.

    Yael Goldstein Love (@ygoldlove) is the Co-Founder and Editorial Director of Plympton, a publishing house devoted to serialized fiction. Her first novel, Overture (paperback title: The Passion of Tasha Darsky) was published by Doubleday in 2007. She graduated from Harvard University with an honors degree in Philosophy.

    What is Twitter looking for? Creativity, it seems. Of course, other authors have already experimented with flash fiction on Twitter, or tweeting out longer stories 140 characters at a time. Thinking of a brand new way to use Twitter to tell a story is probably what they’re looking for:

    “Tell us how you are going to explore content formats that already exist on Twitter — short story in Tweets, a Twitter chat, live-tweeting — or, even better, how you’ll create a new one. How will you work with our real-time global platform, where anyone can contribute to your story at any moment? The proposal must fit into the time window of our five day festival— but that means that a project could run for the length of the festival, or just for an hour,” said Twitter as they announced the project.

    The aforementioned panel will announce the official participants of the festival on November 19th. The festival itself will kick off on November 28th and run for five days.

  • Collaborate With Dead Literary Giants To Make Some Quirky Google Docs

    Back in April, after unveiling their brand new cloud storage service Drive, Google launched a mini campaign called “Gone Google” (or “Go Google”) to promote some of their most popular products – Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs. The point, I assume, is that switching over to all-Google products for your everyday productivity needs means that you’ve “Gone Google.”

    Since then, Google has periodically dropped some fun little “ads” on YouTube, most of which highlight a feature of one of the aforementioned services in a quirky way. You may remember the one featuring Hall & Oates that showed the two working on the lyrics to “Maneater” using Google Docs. The point of that video was to showcase the collaboration feature, which allows multiple authors to work on the same document in real-time. We learned that collaboration in Google Docs was the only thing that made sure we sang “she’s a maneater” as opposed to “she’s a mangobbler” all these years.

    Today, Google gives us a new way to think about Google Docs collaborations – one with a particularly literary twist:

    Google Docs allow you to collaborate with anyone in real time. See what it’s like by joining up with some famous authors to create something worth sharing

    If you head on over to the Docs Demo: Masters Edition, you’ll find a blank Google Doc already populated with six iconic collaborators – Friedrich Nietzsche, William Shakespeare, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Emily Dickinson, Charles Dickens, and Edgar Allen Poe. If you start typing, those authors may just join the party and either correct something you’ve already written, or add a little nugget of their own:

    As you can see, Mr. Shakespeare changed my “you” to “thou,” and Mr. Nietzsche, well, added his own spice to Pulp Fiction dialogue.

    Whether you buy into switching all of your productivity services over to Google, you have to admit that it’s a pretty clever demonstration of one of their most prominent features. Plus, who wouldn’t want the likes of Charles Dickens giving their writing that extra bit of…stuffiness?

  • Facebook Posts Turned Into A Book

    Facebook Posts Turned Into A Book

    When Cynthia Legette Davis began posting inspirational messages for her Facebook friends in 2010, little did she know the posts would wind up as a book. But that’s exactly what happened. The inspirational Facebook posts now make up Davis’ newest book entitled, “Peace Tips for Life – Ideas and Inspiration for Personal Peace”.

    “I originally wrote the messages for myself,” Davis says. “Although they were initially for my spiritual growth and benefit, I always knew they were meant to be shared to also encourage others. I thought, ‘What better way than on Facebook?”’

    Davis says she began posting the messages as “peace tips”—ones she had written over the years and new ones she wrote that year—on her Facebook page. She did that three to five times a week throughout most of 2010.

    Along the way, she started a Facebook group entitled “Peace in Us,” through which to better share the peace tips with interested Facebook friends. Within less than two weeks, nearly 500 people had joined the group. Within a few months, the “Peace in Us” group had grown to more than 1200 people who wanted to receive the peace tips.

    “Throughout that year, I received so many messages from my Facebook friends saying how much the peace tips meant to them and encouraged them,” Davis says. “By the end of that year, I was inspired to compile them into a book. I knew a book would enable me to share the peace tips with even more people in a bigger way.” Davis says she doesn’t know if she would have compiled the peace tips into a book had it not been for the encouragement she received from her Facebook friends.

    Peace Tips for Life was recently published as a gift-sized book packed with nearly 200 thought-provoking inspirational messages for people seeking more peace and balance in their lives. Davis says many of the ideas are not necessarily new, but offer different insights and perspectives on familiar ideas about personal peace.

    “I believe we know deep inside what to do in life to have peace. God is constantly revealing it to us, but sometimes we’re too busy to hear or sometimes we simply forget,” Davis says. “Peace Tips for Life is, therefore, a book of reminders—inspirational memory joggers for us all.”