The British Film Institute has released the first filmed version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.  This British film was made in 1903 by Cecil Hepworth and Percy Stow.

Head over to Literary Kicks to try your literary knowledge against a cool puzzle.  Guess what the picture is of and what it has to do with a book.  This kind of thing can keep you going for hours while you hunt through your book collection for clues and learn about fascinating web sites you [...]

Someone named Brian Duffy at Massachusetts College of Art and Design made this peculiar animation featuring the voice of William S. Burroughs. He gets that face animation of Burroughs just absolutely perfect. And that copy of Naked Lunch is the exact copy I’m reading this very evening. Who is this animator?  He’s [...]

Henry Miller hated America. So he moved to Paris and then, eventually, moved back to the U.S. In this 1969 television interview, he says he thinks the end is near for America. He was right. Bush ended it in 2000. We just don’t realize it yet. We’ve elected an [...]

The University of Texas has an excellent program online called The Edgar Allen Poe Digital Collection.  They’ve got digital copies of Poe manuscripts, letters, early editions, books that he owned, newspaper clippings, and photos.  This image shows an edition of collected poems owned by Poe in which can be seen his handwritten notes and corrections [...]

The Rumpus has short article by Julie Greicius about her favorite book by biographer James Lord who recently passed away.  His book, A Giacometti Portrait, chronicles the effort by Alberto Giacometti to paint a portrait of Mr. Lord.  The work goes on for days with the artist constantly destroying the previous day’s work and [...]

I’ve never been able to get through a book by Thomas Pynchon. Well, I should reveal that I’ve only tried once with his Against the Day.  Unreadable as far as I’m concerned.  But I still went out and bought a copy of Gravity’s Rainbow.  James Joyce is unreadable too and yet I still like [...]

Improving upon the most boring character in the history of world literature, Electronic Arts is going to release an action game called Dante’s Inferno.  From the looks of the preview, this version of the Dante character is much more interesting and capable than the literary original who is the main character in the Divine Comedy [...]

Five Chapters is a literary site that offers stories in 5-chapter installments each week.  Begun by magazine editor Dave Daley, Five Chapters has published over 150 stories by such authors as Stewart O’Nan, Arthur Phillips, Curtis Sittenfeld, John Wray, Wells Tower, Julia Glass, Darin Strauss, Jay McInerney and Kate Christensen.  The site has an incredible [...]

Robert Berry is adapting Ulysses by James Joyce into web comic form.  It’s very watercolory and seems to capture that disjointed free-floating narrative of the novel pretty well.
Read the Ulysses Web Comic
I found this via Literary Kicks.

The Rumpus has a piece that Charles Bukowski wrote as a forward to a book of poems by William Wantling in 1974.  He writes about meeting the other poet for the first time and liking him.  It must have been a big thing to be liked by Bukowski because he seems to have a problem [...]

My wife and I were knocking around New York City last week because we visited the excellent show of Picasso paintings and etchings at the Gagosian Gallery on West 21st Street.  Afterward, we stopped into The Strand bookstore in Greenwich Village.  They were selling the book that accompanies the Picasso show for a full twenty [...]

The excellent literary blog called The Elegant Variations has a 4-part post that reprints an essay by Susan Bell about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s revisions to The Great Gatsby through his close work with editor Max Perkins.  Bell discusses the absolutely crystal sharp writing in Gatsby that was the result of meticulous rewrites from Fitzgerald and [...]

New Statesman has a very interesting article by Keith Gessen about George Orwell’s ‘plain spoken’ style that manifested itself in a series of essays in the 1940s and found its full expression in his masterwork, Nineteen Eighty-Four. It’s fascinating to read about how Orwell’s experiences with fighting in Spain during the civil war in the [...]

Here’s an article by Tim Martin in The Telegraph about how computer games are having a growing influence on literature.  As the game’s trailer shows, the upcoming computer game, Dante’s Inferno, will be a wild ride into hell.  I’m sure the game is full of levels as most games are and as Dante’s original literary [...]

Lee Siegel has written an article in the Wall Street Journal called Where Have All the Muses Gone? Huh.  Well, let’s see if we can make a half-hearted stab at figuring that out.  Where have they all gone?  The first important thing to realize is that muses are female.  Apparently.  I’ve read through Mr. Siegel’s [...]

Shimmer is a magazine of contemporary speculative fiction.  Kind of a fantasy/sci-fi sort of thing.  They are offering their latest issue with 12 stories in it as a free download.  Some of the titles included are, The Carnivale of Abandoned Tales, Jaguar Woman, Counting Down to the End of the Universe, and an author interview.
Download [...]

In China, there’s a revolution in online novels.  Writers are uploading their books to be read by millions of Chinese readers who pay a small amount for each book.  The leading company offering online novels in China is Shanda Literature.  Their site, Qidian.com, is the most popular destination for novel readers.  Even regular bookstores are [...]

Here’s an illustration from Miguel de Cervantes’ novel, Don Quixote. It was done by Gustave Doré. It shows Don Quixote reading a book of chivalry in his library.  I love the way Doré shows all the madness of Quixote’s imagination surrounding him in his chair as if his imagination and the book were coming to [...]