Truman Capote, Gay Talese, and Lester Bangs on how to write great nonfiction Photo by Carl Van Vechten/Library of Congress. Every weekend, Longform shares a collection of great stories from its archive with Slate. For daily picks of new and classic nonfiction, check out Longform or follow @longform on Twitter. Have an iPad? Each week we put together a collection of stories on a theme; this week’s theme is how those stories get written. Truman Capote, George Plimpton • New York Times • January 1966 A conversation about a new art form called “creative journalism,” conducted the same month In Cold Blood was published. “Twelve years ago I began to train myself, for the purpose of this sort of book, to transcribe conversation without using a tape-recorder. Katie Roiphe • Paris Review • Summer 2009 An interview with Talese on his career and daily writing routine. “INTERVIEWER: How do you write? Emily Brennan • Guernica • September 2012 An interview with Katherine Boo about how you cover the world’s poorest. George Orwell • Gangrel • June 1946 Notes for the next generation.
Rapture of the Nerds by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross Gondar primulon, Earthling! Welcome to the free CC-licensed ebook! We know that there's no way we could keep you from getting a free copy of this from some dodgy corner of the Internet. Rather than send you off to the kind of site you'd better visit through a proxy with your cookies turned off, we're giving you this-here free, pristine, hand-crafted ebook in a variety of formats. USA: Amazon Kindle (DRM-free) Barnes and Noble Nook (DRM-free) Google Books (DRM-free) Kobo (DRM-free) Apple iBooks (DRM-free) Amazon Booksense (will locate a store near you!) Canada: Amazon Kindle (DRM-free) Kobo (DRM-free) Chapters/Indigo Amazon.ca This book is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 license. You are free: to Share—to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution. More info here: See the end of this file for the complete legalese.
The History of Rome by Titus Livius, in 6 vols. About this Title: Livy’s History of Rome begins with its founding and continues up to the reign of Augustus. Copyright information: The text is in the public domain. Fair use statement: This material is put online to further the educational goals of Liberty Fund, Inc. Appian's Roman History The Author, the Manuscripts For now, only the Civil Wars, and only the English translation: although there is, that I know of, no Greek original of the work online anywhere, I do not plan to enter it myself, since those, now few, who read Greek will very likely have access to the TLG. For Appian's Foreign Wars, the links, in italics, are to the English translation at Livius. There is also a Greek text and an English translation online at Perseus. Translation The English translation is that by Horace White, first published in 1913 as part of the Loeb Classical Library. As almost always, I retyped the text by hand rather than scanning it — not only to minimize errors prior to proofreading, but as an opportunity for me to become intimately familiar with the work, an exercise which I heartily recommend: Qui scribit, bis legit. The transcription is being minutely proofread. Edition Used
Larry Niven – Flash Crowd | FROM EDGE to edge and for all of its length, from Central Los Angeles through Beverly Hills and West Los Angeles and Santa Monica to the sea, Wilshire Boulevard was a walkway. Once there had been white lines on concrete, and raised curbs to stop the people from interfering with the cars. Now the lines were gone, and much of the concrete was covered with soil and grass. There were even a few trees. Jerryberry Jansen lived in what had been a seaside motel halfway between Bakersfield and San Francisco. The east end of Wilshire Boulevard was a most ordinary T-intersection between high, blocky buildings. The mall had been a walkway when displacement booths were no more than a theorem in quantum mechanics. The explosive growth of the mall riot has taken enforcement agencies by surprise. For Eric Jansen and his family, displacement booths came as a disaster. In the morning there were messages stored in his phone. „Hello? Wash Evans was five feet four inches tall. „Sound is only part of it.
"Nightfall" by Isaac Asimov Isaac Asimov. "Nightfall" Title: Nightfall Author: Isaac Asimov Original copyright year: 1941 Genre: science fiction Date of e-text: September 12, 1999 Prepared by: Ken If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God?' EMERSON Aton 77, director of Saro University, thrust out a belligerent lower lip and glared at the young newspaperman in a hot fury. Theremon 762 took that fury in his stride.
We - Zamyatin “[Zamyatin’s] intuitive grasp of the irrational side of totalitarianism — human sacrifice, cruelty as an end in itself — makes [We] superior to Huxley’s [Brave New World].” —George Orwell An inspiration for George Orwell’s 1984 and a precursor to the work of Philip K. Dick, Ayn Rand (Anthem), and Stanislaw Lem, We is a classic of dystopian science fiction ripe for rediscovery. Written in 1921 by the Russian revolutionary Yevgeny Zamyatin, this story of the thirtieth century is set in the One State, a society where all live for the collective good and individual freedom does not exist. Although fiction, it is a story informed by the war communism of the Soviet Union, and was of course completely banned in Russia. The novel takes the form of the diary of state mathematician D-503, who, to his shock, experiences the most disruptive emotion imaginable: love for another human being. “One of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.”
Vignette in Literature Vignette is not a term I remember ever hearing in school. I learned about them through writer’s groups and conferences. A vignette is a short, well written scene. It does not have a plot, but it does reveal something about the elements in it. Wikipedia describes a vignette as “a short impressionistic scene that focuses on one moment or gives a trenchant impression about a character, an idea, or a setting and sometimes an object. Please feel free to share your own Vignette’s or links to more information about them. Side note: A special thank you to Aimee for awarding me this "Versatile Blogger" Award. How to Write a Vignette A rule of thumb for vignettes of like items is to use 3 items of different colors and heights, or 3 items... Writing a good illustration is easier than you thought! This article will explain how to write a good, effective, and powerful illustration...
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Rolling Stone We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive. ..." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about 100 miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail Then it was quiet again. It was almost noon, and we still had more than 100 miles to go. The sporting editors had also given me $300 in cash, most of which was already spent on extremely dangerous drugs. All this had been rounded up the night before, in a frenzy of high-speed driving all over Los Angeles County – from Topanga to Watts, we picked up everything we could get our hands on. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. "Man, this is the way to travel," said my attorney. One toke? "Is that right?" Jesus! Of course. "What?"
'Crowd Control,' our crowdsourced science fiction novel, starts here Six months after we asked readers to help us write a science fiction novel, we present "Crowd Control," CNET's first work of crowdsourced fiction. Hundreds of contributors -- more than 120 whose names we know and many more anonymous -- collaborated via a single Google Doc, working under a Creative Commons license to shape a rough draft of a story. That draft is still online for anyone to take from or build upon, and CNET edited and expanded it to create our own version of the story, which comes in at almost 50,000 words. We will publish that story on CNET over the next four to five weeks, along with more inside details on how it came to be. April 19, 2051 - Earth Version EB-2 The moment that would come to define the relationship of two planets across two universes was based on a lie. "So, you're telling us that you know God? "Sure, I know God very well," the tall woman said nonchalantly, leaning forward in response. Like all good lies, this one was designed to be applied broadly. Ed.