Apparently the in thing for Americans of about my age, neither quite Gen. X nor what people have in mind when they stereotype Millennials, is to style themselves the Oregon Trail Generation (after the educational computer game, not the 19th Century pioneers, who are conveniently no longer around to complain). So what does that make Brits …

Until recently I thought the trickiest thing about long-term intergenerational ethics was the need to peer into distant, largely unpredictable futures. I have changed my mind. After pondering sentences like ‘Unborn generations depend on us’ (will depend? are going to depend? will be already depending? are yet going to have used to depend? will have been …

Various online thesaurus sites have in their databases the word duskheap, as a synonym for e.g. midden. This looks very likely to be a typo for dustheap; no duskheap seems to be known even (no pun intended) to the O.E.D. What a beautiful error though: imagine digging on a duskheap, through the layered remnants of countless …

The fear of piracy has forced many publishers into using unfriendly DRM systems that halts the sharing of stories. With OpenBooks.com readers are free to make copies to send to friends and continue spreading great literature from our rapidly growing indie author community. There are no restrictions on making copies and sharing them with others. In …

I have a small collection of quotations, sporadically extended, for use with fortune (which ensures that Internet Explorer, for one, will probably throw away the *nix-style line breaks). The taxonomy has proved unfortunate: worldliness and world-weariness have turned out to suggest rather more items for inclusion than unworldly or otherworldly dreaminess. Still, since some of these …

Odd values are already being projected onto the authors of the future:

The news that Jack Vance has passed away reminded me of an unsolved lexicographical mystery which now seems further than ever from resolution: the source of the word libram for a grimoire or more generically a book, which has turned up in various works of fantasy and for which Vance is thought to be the earliest …

An exciting discovery: a forthcoming publication of the Philosophical Essays of Fernando Pessoa.After last year’s Metaphysical Courier (another book still to get hold of), perhaps it seemed timely. I don’t know offhand how many of the essays were written in Portuguese and whether any were in Pessoa’s sort-of-native English (no translator being named), but judging by …

In the small ads. section of Private Eye #1327, just under an advert for a book of ‘witty toilet graffiti’, is an unusual entry:

I’m looking forward to the forthcoming translation of Giacomo Leopardi’s Zibaldone, but this description (though entrancing) gave me pause:

Illegible handwriting may be commonplace, but one normally thinks of asemic writing, and of pseudobiblia, as exotic and maturely experimental and vaguely avant garde. Then again...

The surge of pseudo-sequels to the writings of deceased authors has reached the point at which a multi-paragraph summary of one literary franchise alone now seems required:

Perhaps it was the most unwanted paintings and music that made writing to a formula interesting
(or at least showed that satisfying a list of what people hated in music could be more striking than chasing what
they liked). Or maybe it was OuLiPo. Then again, every adherence to a genre or
emulation of a classical …

But agriculture experts were unable to explain why chemical-free melons were exploding. They cited the weather and abnormal size of the melon as factors... [One farmer] said he had used chemicals to boost their growth on 6 May, and the following day more than 180 melons exploded. Mr Liu was reported to be the only farmer …

Can completing a book affect or reflect its cultural ties?