The American novelist, whose latest work is a fake biography of an avant-garde artist, on growing up in Mississippi and why her fiction has ‘never actively involved cellphones or the internet’Catherine Lacey, 37, is the author of three previous novels, including The Answers, currently being adapted for television by Darren Aronofsky, and Pew (2020), about a nameless amnesiac of ambiguous race and gender. Her new novel, Biography of X, set in a parallel America, follows a widow untangling the life story of her wife, an avant-garde artist known as X. The New York Times has called it “sprawling and ambitious… strange and dystopian”. Lacey, one of Granta’s best young American novelists in 2017, was speaking from her home in Brooklyn.Which part of the book came first: the alternate history or the fake biography?I liked the idea of writing a fake biography and the biographies I like best are usually written by someone with some kind of compromised perspective. I thought the worst person to write a biography would be a surviving spouse with a bit of a grudge, but I didn’t want to get into the heterosexual dynamics of a man writing about a woman or a woman writing about a man; it had to be two women. At the same time, I wanted the novel to be set in the mid-20th century but I wasn’t interested in writing about the actual struggles a prominent lesbian couple would have gone through in that time. So my alternate history grew out of that problem. I thought, if I have an America... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'
[ The Guardian | 2023-04-01 17:00:01 UTC ]
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Four months after introducing video, Instagram took the natural next step today, telling its over 150 million users their streams would soon include ads too.The company, acquired by Facebook for $736 million in 2012, announced the development in a short blog post it published Thursday afternoon.... Continue reading at Advertising Age
[ Advertising Age | 2013-10-04 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Retirement means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. For Steven Soderbergh, it has meant, turning his attention away from directing theatrical releases at a breakneck pace, and working on any number of other projects instead. One such project involved writing a novella on... Continue reading at Fast Company
[ Fast Company | 2013-09-26 00:00:00 UTC ]
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@Horse_ebooks is the Twitter account that, until today, spewed frequent bouts of eerily poetic nonsense to more than 213,000 followers: @Horse_ebooks was widely believed to be a Twitter bot whose tweets were sent out by a robot that scraped text from obscure parts of the Internet. That is, until... Continue reading at Fast Company
[ Fast Company | 2013-09-25 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Twitter is quite the medium. An endless source of looping GIFs, "viral" videos, and, sadly, bad advertising. Most of the latter category is quickly dismissed by the block and report spam features of Twitter, but the occasional spambot elevates its "craft" to a level of surreal bliss which begs... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2013-09-24 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Google's got an ad exchange. So does Facebook. Twitter is said to be working on one too. But in the meantime, the company has just purchased MoPub, a burgeoning mobile ad exchange business. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. MoPub has built an ad exchange through which mobile publishers... Continue reading at AdWeek
[ AdWeek | 2013-09-10 00:00:00 UTC ]
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JCDecaux has launched a Twitter-driven book club to connect with commuters and use its digital screens in stations to enhance commuters' journeys. Continue reading at Media Week
[ Media Week | 2013-08-29 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Tumblr was nearly as busy as Twitter during MTV's Video Music Awards on Sunday when it came to the sheer number of content contributors, per Union Metrics, a company that offers analytics for both platforms. The San Francisco tech firm says 1.1 million Tumblr users posted content with... Continue reading at AdWeek
[ AdWeek | 2013-08-27 00:00:00 UTC ]
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BookVibe allows users to search their tweets and extract the books that are being discussed by the people they follow on Twitter. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2013-07-25 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Upset by the 'not guilty' verdict in George Zimmerman's murder trial, one Twitter user started the online campaign that ended Martin Literary Agency's representation of Juror B37, who announced plans to write a book about the trial. Continue reading at Publishing Perspectives
[ Publishing Perspectives | 2013-07-16 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Recent Twitter hacks done this spring by a group called the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) on the Associated Press and The Onion have brought attention to the vulnerability of a media organization’s social media account. Continue reading at Folio Magazine
[ Folio Magazine | 2013-06-06 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Time was, when a company got a winning product (or formula), it was set for a few generations, or at least for several years. Not so today—even less so in the content or in the digital space. Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2013-04-13 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Twitter is being used as a "commissioning channel", Random House digital publisher Dan... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2013-03-14 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Biz Stone's and Ev Williams's fledgling online publishing platform takes a few more social steps toward maturity. Medium, from the same minds that brought us Twitter, is already a new kind of online publishing platform...and now it's trying out a novel commenting system for published pieces:... Continue reading at Fast Company
[ Fast Company | 2013-02-08 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Twitter co-founder Evan Williams shares more details about his new publishing platform. Continue reading at AllThingsD
[ AllThingsD | 2012-09-25 00:00:00 UTC ]
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If you've ever been so embroiled in a chat or sharing splurge that you've been told to "take it off of Twitter," you now can -- sort of. Twitter co-creators Biz Stone and Ev Williams have launched Branch and Medium, two companion services that (naturally) use a Twitter sign-in but narrow the... Continue reading at Engadget
[ Engadget | 2012-08-16 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Twitter cofounders Biz Stone and Evan Williams today offered a preview of Medium, their new publishing platform. Medium is at heart a blogging service, although right now it's only open to a select few authors. The posts are organized into "collections" that use different layouts depending on... Continue reading at Fast Company
[ Fast Company | 2012-08-15 00:00:00 UTC ]
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After posting significant gains in 2011, the 16 publishers highlighted in PW’s annual Twitter snapshot all continued growing in 2012, showing that the book activity on the social media platform is still increasing substantially. All told, the total number of Twitter followers across all 16... Continue reading at Publishers Weekly
[ Publishers Weekly | 2012-06-15 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Sceptre has acquired two titles which look to give more insight into two of the world's... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2012-06-01 00:00:00 UTC ]
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In February, the Educational Development Corporation said it would remove all its titles from Amazon, more evidence of the tumult over who gets to decide how much a book costs. Continue reading at The New York Times
[ The New York Times | 2012-04-16 00:00:00 UTC ]
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Elle, the fashion and beauty brand published by Hearst Magazines UK, has doubled its magazine subscriptions after its first live digital streaming of a cover shoot via Twitter. Continue reading at Media Week
[ Media Week | 2012-03-30 00:00:00 UTC ]
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