How F. Scott Fitzgerald’s signature changed during the first 21 years of his life, via.

Wuthering Heights gets the heavy metal treatment.

Making the case for slow reading, via.

My newest favorite online article McSweeney’s: “To the cult I inadvertantly started last night.”

Why the stories of Ray Bradbury have seeped into our culture.

The Fiction Circus on “genre pollution.”

Unwords is a dictionary dedicated to made-up words, via.

Aaaand to get you through the rest of the week: Brontë Sisters! Activate! Read more »

Remember this from a few months back?

For the last few months, we’ve been working hard with the good folks over at Anthology Media to put together a spiffy new web video series for you. The concept is pretty simple: we get writers, musicians, actors, and other creative types to summarize their favorite novels. In 60 seconds or less. With no time to prepare.

One of most the interesting aspects we found about this project was how it reflected the sorts of things people take away from fiction. We had each participant summarize a couple of stories, and everyone seemed to have a theme. Carolina, who you’ll see in a few weeks, managed to end each of her 60-second summaries with the concept of love. Morgan somehow related everything back to prostitutes and redemption. Other themes? Dinosaurs and aliens. This was all the more interesting when the stories in question contained neither dinosaurs nor aliens.

We’re kicking off the project with Matt Mazur, a NYC-based folk and comedy musician. He composed this little diddly about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby off the top of his head. Enjoy and, if you like it, please share:

Some lawyers have canceled a Harry Potter-themed dinner for children. Then, they kicked a puppy.

Tom Cruise has been revealed as the inspiration for Christian Bale’s performance in American Psycho. I feel vaguely unsurprised.

Walt Whitman in a Levi’s commercial. Wait, what?

A research associate at NYU has procured funding to rewrite Melville’s Moby Dick entirely in emoticons.

If you liked bad poetry, here are some awful opening sentences from a bad fiction writing contest. Also, if you’re interested in writing some bad fiction of your own, some tips include using as many adjectives as you can, describing every character in minute detail, taking no account of narrative pacing, and more.

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