Artists often find this discovery argument seductive, but only up to a point. Patrick Carney of Black Keys said in 2011: “For unknown bands and smaller bands, it’s a really good thing to get yourself out there. But for a band that makes a living selling music,” streaming royalties are “not at a point yet to be feasible for us”. How do you make the transition from “I’ll give away anything to get noticed” to “Sorry, now you have to pay for my music”? Carney’s implied point is important – the core issue is about sustainability; how can artists survive in the long term beyond that initial surge of interest?

Are these services evil? Are they simply a legalised version of file-sharing sites such as Napster and Pirate Bay – with the difference being that with streaming services the big labels now get hefty advances? The debate as to whether those pirate sites cannibalise possible sales goes on. Some say freeloaders wouldn’t have paid for music anyway, so there’s no real loss; others say freeloaders are mainly super-fans who end up paying artists in other ways, buying concert tickets and T-shirts, for example. Though, as author Chris Ruen points out in his book Freeloading, if you yourself didn’t pay for any of the music by your favourite bands, then don’t be surprised if they eventually call it quits for lack of funds.

Read the full article at the Guardian.

Jason Schwartz has written what is essentially a novella-length version of the American Horror Story credit sequence(s): unsettling, choppy, eerie… and yet strangely (and wonderfully) compelling.

The overwhelming majority of this book is comprised of odd images, shattered by other images or thoughts crossing through: a boy with a bird in his throat, a body turned into an object turned into a story, a house in semi-rural Pennsylvania (a land I know well, which also gave me an inside track to the novel in a way) that seems to shift under the reader’s eye. But it is not the house that shifts – you almost come to believe, over the course of the reading, that it is (to be really cliché about it) you who are shifting. There is a tug to Schwartz’s words that I cannot fully explain and it keeps you off balance, the story slipping away from you even as you try to grasp it.

Read the full piece in the The Next Best Book Blog.

Writers No One Reads picks Jason Schwartz’s John the Posthumous for its 2013 year-end book list, calling it “one of the most unusual pieces of fiction published this year.”

See the full list of chosen titles at Writers No One Reads.

OR Books has combined the bookstore and restaurant into a single establishment, creating a temporary pop-up bookshop at Alexandra in the West Village.

New York City readers can visit the restaurant from now until October 25th. Readers elsewhere can follow the #restORant hashtag on Twitter.

The temporary menu offers OR Books-themed specials paired with select books from the OR Books list. Every guest gets a free eBook with the meal.

Read the full article at GalleyCat.

Jason Schwartz’s second book arrives more than a decade after Knopf published his first—the short story collection A German Picturesque—in 1998. Like A German Picturesque, John the Posthumous is experimental fiction and it is similar in style to Schwartz’s earlier work. Readers who admired those stories will certainly appreciate John the Posthumous, and may have already read sections of the book that were previously published in print and online literary journals.

But what to say about Schwartz’s latest? Well, it’s a novella—sort of. It is certainly strange and bewildering. Paragraphs contain declarative sentences that state arcane facts. Sometimes those facts turn out to be fabricated. (“The word adultery does not, in fact, derive from cry—just as you had suspected—and the town, I will concede, suitably antique, and quiet now, stands in lieu of another town.”) Only on occasion does the first-person narrator insert himself into the text. Old-fashioned words and jargon are frequently used but rarely interfere with the rhythm or direction—such as it is—of this dark, peculiar novella.

Schwartz’s prose is obsessive and repetitive, often with in-sentence contradictions or qualifications. His language can be poetic, sometimes hypnotic. Elsewhere the writing is taut, which when combined with macabre subject matter creates a perceivable tension and anxiety. Schwartz, meanwhile, seamlessly combines the real and the invented. To wit, readers might be interested to know that John the Posthumous — he of the excellent title to this book — was indeed an actual person. He was a French king who lived for a mere five days in November 1316.

Throughout the novella Schwartz centers on several specific subjects, e.g. architecture, etymology, entomology, and ornithology. He writes in detail about geographical names, folklore, household fires, war history, tableware, weapons, beds, coffins, embalming, and biblical text. In experimental writing like Schwartz’s, sentences are the paramount element. Yet digression and assemblage might be the important artistic techniques here. Schwartz’s words have the precision of a poet’s, but his prose is the compositional work of an accomplished collagist. As such, Schwartz is able to collate in John the Posthumous a fine baroque art piece on domesticity, marriage, and betrayal.

Read the full review at The Rumpus.

Patrick Ruffini: I think in this discussion it’s helpful to distinguish between the big issues (Obamacare, debt ceiling, taxes, etc.) that receive the bulk of press coverage and heavily divided along partisan lines, and back burner bills dealing with obscure regulatory issues that are actually the majority of what Congress deals with (especially at the committee level) and which are the focus of the vast majority of lobbying dollars. SOPA was just such a bill. It attracted bipartisan support, and eventually bipartisan opposition. The two parties in this case were not R and D, but content on one side and technology on the other (both users and big players united).

From a conservative (and non-corporatist) perspective, Congress’s preoccupation with these bills is problematic because a lot of issues that should be dealt with in the marketplace are actually being dealt with by regulators or members of Congress who aren’t qualified to arbitrate between different industries. And a lot of conservatives go along with this, taking convoluted positions that favor some form of government regulation (copyright being one, but you could go down the list and include Internet taxes etc.) and getting away with it because the issues are fairly obscure, and no one is going to call them on this inconsistency.

Our role in SOPA was to make sure that they couldn’t get away with that, and that this actually became an issue for grassroots conservative primary voters. Eventually, every Republican Presidential candidate was asked about this and all opposed it.

Read the full discussion at Firedoglake.

OR Books is what you might call a newfangled publishing house–they’re trying to re-think the paradigm of selling books in the digital age. Instead of printing physical copies of their books in mass quantity, they mainly print on demand and sell digital copies. However, while many of these up-and-coming houses have come and gone, OR has made themselves something of an outlier by not abandoning print all together, and by having a well-honed sensibility and sleek aesthetic. OR cares about their authors, making them not just a publishing house, but a publishing home. And, starting this Friday they are making a novel attempt at re-imagining the bookstore.

OR Books will be erecting their very own pop-up book shop at Alexandria (456 Hudson between Barrow and Morton) an restaurant in the West Village , which they’re calling a #restORrant. The event kicks off with a cocktail party on Friday night at 6pm and runs through Thursday, Oct. 24. All week long OR authors will be dining at the restaurant, and a free e-book will be served to patrons with each meal. Of course, OR’s catalogue of paperbacks will be available for sale and perusal throughout the week.

Read more at Brooklyn Based.

FDL Book Salon: Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, The Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet

Hacking Politics is a firsthand account of how a ragtag band of activists and technologists overcame a $90 million lobbying machine to defeat the most serious threat to Internet freedom in memory. The book is a revealing look at how Washington works today – and how citizens successfully fought back.

Written by the core Internet figures – video gamers, Tea Partiers, tech titans, lefty activists and ordinary Americans among them – who defeated a pair of special interest bills called SOPA (“Stop Online Piracy Act”) and PIPA (“Protect IP Act”), Hacking Politics provides the first detailed account of the glorious, grand chaos that led to the demise of that legislation and helped foster an Internet-based network of amateur activists.

Included are more than thirty original contributions from across the political spectrum, featuring writing by Internet freedom activist Aaron Swartz; Lawrence Lessig of Harvard Law School; novelist Cory Doctorow; Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA.); Jamie Laurie (of the alt-rock/hip-hop group The Flobots); Ron Paul; Mike Masnick, CEO and founder of Techdirt; Tiffiniy Cheng, co-founder and co-director of Fight for the Future; Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit; Nicole Powers of Suicide Girls; Josh Levy, Internet Campaign Director at Free Press, and many more.

Read more at Firedoglake.com.

Clancy Sigal has written a new book: Hemingway Lives!: Why Reading Ernest Hemingway Matters Today.

Sigal investigates the significance of Hemingway’s works, and also the personal life of the famous author. Hemingway was influenced and inspired by powerful figures from Teddy Roosevelt to the Kansas City Star journalists to Fidel Castro, as well as key events including the Great War.

We learn that Hemingway’s life experiences helped prepare him for a prominent role in fighting fascism, including against Franco’s coup in Spain.

Listen to the full interview at The Taylor Report.

Read the full review at The Rumpus.

What might a deconstructive history of the marriage bed look like from the marginalized perspective of the cuckold, a figure whose terrain is inverted from one of traditional mockery to one of horror and riddling apocrypha? What might blood say if it could speak—not only the blood as it pulses through one’s veins, but also the blood that is let in the act of a murder, the stains it leaves behind on furniture old enough to have supported monarchical bodies? What, then, might an exegesis of blood, lineage, promise, and betrayal entail? What do inhabited and uninhabited spaces have to offer one keen on tracing images back to their origins: what might these interiors and both their real and imagined occupants say to bear witness to a wound laid bare, as raw as history and as ripe as a knife?

And what might a series of these meditations look like as they are continued laterally alongside one another? It would look very well like Jason Schwartz’s John the Posthumous (OR Books, 2013), a dizzyingly delightful and hypnotically haunting book that resists easy classification, not to mention what painstaking effort it would take to summarize the “plot,” an effort that would be for naught as the narrative threads remain elusive, even as they are dangled right in front of the reader’s face.

Read the full review at 3:AM Magazine.

One could be forgiven for thinking Raja Shehadeh has grown bitter after decades of seemingly futile opposition to an Israeli occupation that has further embedded itself and dimmed the prospects of freedom for his fellow Palestinians.

…

In person, however, Shehadeh, perhaps the most prominent Palestinian author among English-reading audiences, above all exudes patience. He believes Israel’s nearly half-century-long occupation will eventually come to an end.

But it may be a long time in coming and produce a radically different outcome than what either Palestinians or Israelis may expect.

“You have to think long term,” Shehadeh said during an interview with The National at an upscale cafe in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

Sitting on a couch of oversized brown and orange pillows that rivalled his diminutive frame, the soft-spoken, London-educated lawyer discussed what he saw as the impermanence of the region’s current political geography.

Read the full article at The National.

Independent publishing — that is, publishing whatever an individual or small group think is worthy of dumping their time and money into — is nothing new. From Virginia and Leonard Woolf starting up Hogarth Press to the early days of Farrar, Straus and Giroux championing now-iconic authors that other publishers wouldn’t touch, DIY publishing has long been responsible for some of our best literature.

That’s why, no matter what the latest doomsday prognostication about the future of big publishing happens to be, this is an exciting time to be a fan of literature. Among the long list of indie presses that are putting out great stuff, we’re singling out 25 that we love — but we encourage you to do some more digging of your own to discover even more great indies that are publishing great works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translated literature, and more.

See the full list at Flavorwire.

John the Posthumous articulates an alien linguistic world, woven together from Biblical quotes, opaque legal cases, and allusions to Winslow Homer’s paintings—not to mention eighteenth-century conduct books, histories of the French monarchy, and the floor-plans of abandoned properties (that’s just to begin with). The book is a baffling accumulation of folklore and apocrypha, convincing fictions and far-fetched facts…

John the Posthumous further intensifies this closeness of focus—only here Schwartz turns his attention to horror. In a sense, every scene is a murder scene; every ornament—“the rod, the shade, the ring”—an “emblem of betrayal.” Alluding to occult codes in old Bibles, the narrator remarks that “Satan appears to the left of every phrase. So goes one old notion.” And this is true of John the Posthumous too; the devil is in the details.

Read the full review at Electric Literature.

If this is a tale of anything, it’s one of cuckoldry (John the Posthumous’s three sections are “Hornbook,” “Housepost, Male Figure” and “Adulterium”), and ensuing matricide/infanticide — every so often, the narrator will speak in the first person, and through these rare moments, we can infer, with the help of a not-too-generous back-cover description, that he has been cheated on, then, it seems, killed his wife and children, and afterwards, perhaps, become an unreliable historian and written this . . . thing. Despite the titular specificity of the sections, the division of the book into its three parts seems a mere formality — the voice and rhythm are adamantly static, providing little in the way of revelation from chapter to chapter. Just as every description reads as an erroneous passage in a madman’s encyclopedia, the differentiation between chapters reads as another decoy from a deeply hidden story, another false and distorted factoid…

Through the abstract beauty, blood and rot of this book, the first person surfaces from the heaps of inanimate objects, reminding us that, despite Schwartz’s anonymizing lists of “household accidents,” beds through the ages, and colonial Pennsylvanian architecture, there’s one specific man with one specific (murdered) family at the heart of this book. These moments keep the reader going, and lead us to think we’re wandering toward epiphany (we probably aren’t).

Read the full review at Full Stop Magazine.

Throwing out ideas and chains of tangential concepts the text raises plenty of questions but the narrator never tackles these head on, choosing instead to circumlocute. Passing through forgotten byways of human knowledge, the narrator gives advice on the correct etiquette or protocol in dealing with vanished cultural norms…

The world as described by Schwarz is not a stage, on which every man must play a part, but rather a steady series of accretions, each contingent and true only in so far as the totality hangs together.

Read the full review at Litro Magazine.

Surprise is information. So an organization that puts all its efforts into planning, tracking, monitoring and documenting to minimize the chance of failure prevents itself from acquiring and spreading information, and consequently from learning. Innovation slows, and the company either atrophies or gets superseded by more agile organizations.

Read the entire post at The Harvard Business Review.

It is not I, but the public who has affected this powerful change to abrogation of basic constitutional rights by secret agencies. It is not I, but newspapers around the world who have risen to hold our governments to the issues when powerful officials sought to distract from these very issues with rumor and insult. And it is not I, but certain brave representatives in governments around the world who are proposing new protections, limits and safeguards to prevent future assault on our private rights and private lives.

My gratitude belongs to all of those who have reached out to their friends and family to explain why suspicionless surveillance matters.

Watch the entire speech here.