40K Books: 99-Cent Essays by Million-Dollar Authors

Trying out the Italian cyberpunk job, or how to buy brilliance for under a dollar.

Over the last few months we’ve taken a few trips to the frontier of electronic publishing to see how various digital developers are building out the landscape. One such new settler is 40K Books, so named because its 99-cent essays and novellas take 40 minutes to just over an hour to read. The Milan, Italy-based startup has put out a series of original works in English, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, both from new writers and established authors and thinkers like Bruce Sterling and Paul Di Filippo. Its non-fiction selections focus on the consequences of and ways in which our “culture is going digital,” while the short fiction skews toward futurist, sci-fi topics. We were sold by 40K’s bold graphic style but stuck around for the imaginative content of the work itself. Here are three favorites from the first run of releases.

FROM WORDS TO BRAIN

MIT graduate student and neuroscientist Livia Blackburne penned the fantastic essay From Words to Brain (Can neuroscience teach you to be a better writer?), which uses the children’s classic “Little Red Riding Hood” to investigate the complex neural connections that take place while we read. Like the TEDBooks series, Blackburne’s piece contains big ideas in a compact, engaging, and accessible package.

For most of human history, written language didn’t even exist. Reading as a cultural invention has only been around for a few thousand years, a snap of a finger in evolutionary terms. We have not, and will not, within any of our lifetimes, evolve a genetic program for reading. Yet our brains are so adept at this skill that it become as reflexive as seeing itself.”

SELLING STORIES SUCCESSFULLY

British marketing professor Stephen Brown authored the highly entertaining piece Selling Stories Successfully, at once a manifesto for “self-promotion and shameless authorpreneurship” and an exploration of what makes for good contemporary fiction. We took assiduous notes – or rather annotated our digital text – while reading this guide for writers who want to see their work get onto shelves and screens.

You have to persuade people to buy it, both literally and metaphorically. You’ve woken up to the fact that storytelling and storyselling are two completely different things. As J.G. Ballard once ruefully observed: ‘any fool can write a novel but it takes real genius to sell it.'”

BLACK SWAN

Master of cyberlit Bruce Sterling spins this enthralling tale about an Italian technology blogger, his unexpected hacker ally, and their discovery – something that threatens to revise history as we know it. We started reading Black Swan and couldn’t put down our Kindle until the last word.

I could explain now, in grueling detail, exactly what memristors are, and how different they are from any standard electronic component. Suffice to understand that, in electronic engineering, memristors did not exist. Not at all. They were technically possible – we’d known that for thirty years, since the 1980s – but nobody had ever manufactured one. A chip with memristors was like a racetrack where the jockeys rode unicorns.”

After these action- and insight-packed reads, we’re very much looking forward to seeing what stakes 40K Books pitches next.

Kirstin Butler is writing an adaptation of Gogol for the Google era called Dead SULs. She currently lives in Cambridge, MA.

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7 Einstein Classics, Digitized for the First Time

What the theory of relativity has to do with world government and the ethics of nuclear proliferation.

On Monday, we celebrated Einstein’s birthday with Albert Einstein: How I See The World, the fantastic 2006 PBS documentary now free to watch online. His birthday also marked the digitization of seven excellent authorized texts from the Albert Einstein Archives, available for the first time in a common electronic format through a collaboration between the Philosophical Library and digital publisher Open Road.

The World As I See It is a fascinating anthology of Einstein’s observations about life, religion, nationalism, and various other personal topics that engaged his mind in the aftermath of WWI. With characteristic blend of wit and idealism, the great genius tackles some of humanity’s most timeless dualities like good vs. evil, science vs. religion, activism vs. pacifism and more. The collection paints a portrait of Einstein as he makes sense of his own mind and a rapidly changing world through letters, speeches, articles, and essays written before 1935, including many rare documents.

Without the sense of fellowship with men of like mind, of preoccupation with the objective, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific research, life would have seemed to me empty.” ~ Albert Einstein, Forum and Century

Essays In Science gathers Einstein’s articles and speeches dissecting the scientific method in his own theoretical discoveries and contextualizing, with palpable admiration and respect, the work of his scientific contemporaries and historical influences, including Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, Max Planck, and Niels Bohr.

What place does the theoretical physicist’s picture of the world occupy among all these possible pictures? It demands the highest possible standard of rigorous precision in the description of relations, such as only the use of mathematical language can give.” ~ Albert Einstein, Principles of Research

Essays In Humanism captures Einstein’s philosophical reflections on the pace of progress, including prescient topics like Zionism and the global economy, in a collection of essays written between 1931 and 1950 amidst the aftermath of The Great Depression and the turbulent early days of the Cold War. Particularly timely, in light of the recent devastation in Japan, are his thoughts on the double-edged sword of nuclear proliferation.

What is the situation? The development of technology and of the implements of war has brought about something akin to a shrinking of our planet. Economic interlinking has made the destinies of nations interdependent to a degree far greater than in previous years.” ~ Albert Einstein, Towards a World Government

Letters to Solovine: 1906-1955 gathers Einstein’s correspondence with Maurice Solovine, his longtime friend and translator, discussing topics across science, politics, philosophy, and religion with remarkable candor and intimacy. Frank, funny and invariably insightful, the letters — which appear in both German and English — offer a rare glimpse of the intersection between Einstein’s private self and his public persona.

Men are even more susceptible to suggestion than horses, and each period is dominated by a mood, with the result that most men fail to see the tyrant who rules over them.” ~ Albert Einstein, Princeton, April 10, 1938

Letters on Wave Mechanics: Correspondence with H. A. Lorentz, Max Planck, and Erwin Schrodinger may be the most technical of the bunch, but it’s no less absorbing a read as we trace the communication between three of the era’s greatest scientific minds. Perhaps most fascinatingly, it’s a thought-provoking perspective shift in the pace of discovery and the time-scale of scientific — and all, really — communication: Just as The Republic of Letters taught us, an email exchange between today’s leading scientists may be near-instantaneous, but the written intellectual debates of yore took weeks and often months for a single idea to be transmitted and responded to, which greatly altered the course of scientific inquiry and debate.

I am as convinced as ever that the wave representation of matter is an incomplete representation of the state of affairs, no matter how practically useful it has proved itself to be.” ~ Albert Einstein to Erwin Schrödinger

The Theory of Relativity: and Other Essays features Einstein’s seven most most important essays on physics, in which the great thinker takes the reader by the hand and guides her through the layered scientific theory that served as the foundation for his discoveries. Compelling yet digestible, the book offers an essential primer on theoretical physics, the laws of science and of ethics, and the fundamental language of scientific inquiry.

The ‘principle of relativity’ in its widest sense is contained in the statement: The totality of physical phenomena is of such a character that it gives no basis for the introduction of the concept of ‘absolute motion;’ or shorter but less precise: There is no absolute motion.” ~ Albert Einstein The Theory of Relativity

Out of My Later Years: The Scientist, Philosopher, and Man Portrayed Through His Own Words is a collection of essays on the topics and disciplines that tickled Einstein’s fancy. From world government to freedom in research to open education, the book, divided into subject matter sections like “Public Affairs” and”Convictions and Beliefs,” is equal parts timely and timeless.

Ethical axioms are found and tested not very differently from the axioms of science. Truth is what stands the test of experience.” ~ Albert Einstein, “The Law of Science and the Laws of Ethics”

Thanks, Janet

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The Art of Immersion: Dissecting the Future of Storytelling

Groping our way into next-gen entertainment, or how the original Star Wars trilogy birthed Lost.

Audiences expect more from their entertainment in 2011. Twenty years into our collective online experience, every genre of traditional popular art — books, film, television — is undergoing profound changes in form and function. A new book from Wired contributor Frank Rose called The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories assembles case studies that both analyze the past and predict the future of fun.

We stand now at the intersection of lure and blur. The future beckons, but we’re only partway through inventing it. We can see the outlines of a new art form, but its grammar is as tenuous and elusive as the grammar of cinema a century ago.

Through interviews with the co-creators of Lost, über-director James Cameron, Sims creator Will Wright and others, Rose describes the new narratives enabled by the interactive possibilities of the Internet. Call it transmedia, gameification, cross-platform convergence, or any other cringe-worthy neologism coined by marketers, we do participate in our pastimes more than ever before. And Rose’s book also contains the critical heft, historical scope, and recent research into brain science that take it beyond these trendy tropes.

[E]very new medium that’s been invented, from print to film to television to cyberspace, has increased the transporting power of narrative. And every new medium has aroused fear and even hostility as a result.

For an authoritative tour of the frontiers of amusement, read the just published The Art of Immersion. Perhaps the 3-D game version is forthcoming?

Kirstin Butler is writing an adaptation of Gogol for the Google era called Dead SULs, but when not working spends far, far too much time on Twitter. She currently lives in Cambridge, MA.

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The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books

Telling the fortune of tales to come, or what finallyfast.com has to do with writing.

Whither the written word? Many meditations on this question, our own included, have appeared on substrate, online, and in streaming newsfeeds of late. We found the most entertaining answers in a new collection called The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books.

Just released this month, The Late American Novel was edited by Jeff Martin and C. Max Magee, writers and, in the case of the latter, founder of one of our favorite sites, The Millions. Martin and Magee have assembled an all-star team of literary visionaries including authors Rivka Galchen, Benjamin Kunkel, and Reif Larsen, and the results are at turns funny, poignant, and searching, but always provocative.

Galchen’s piece “The Future of Paper” opens the anthology with this LOL-worthy, tongue-in-cheek fable:

In Brooklyn, a paper-making collective was formed. A neglected commercial space for the collective was renovated with great flair and through the sweat of women with really cute bangs. However, the original Save Paper mission became overshadowed by the collective’s far more successful sideline of selling homemade organic yogurt and handmade patches created by prisoners whose only thread was harvested from striped gym socks.”

The joy of compilations lies in their contributors’ differing approaches and viewpoints, much in evidence here. Kunkel takes the historical perspective in his essay, creating a narrative of modern culture that moves from the “logosphere” to the “graphosphere” to our current context, which he dubs the “digitosphere.” Larsen, in his Pynchonian piece “The Crying of Lot 45,” uses illustrated marginalia to highly entertaining ends.

Writers especially will find inspiration among the book’s essays, as in Lauren Groff’s “Modes of Imagining the Writer of the Future”:

He is the one drawing word after word, pushing his sentences outward, into the darkness, into the thrilling unknown. He’s not going to put it off for tomorrow, and he’s not content with yesterday’s work. He is the one alone somewhere, writing, right now. And right now. And right now.”

As with Groff’s piece, our favorites among the bunch were those that ended with a reveille, rallying cries to creators in all places and of all media to get out there and do. In the words of writer Ander Monson:

Are we going to have to find new ways to get noticed? Yes. Do we get to find news ways to get noticed? Yes. Is it trouble? Yes. But trouble is the stuff of writing and creation. Time to shut up and get to the making, get back to that sense of play where everything interesting, including the future, finally fast and soon to be here, starts.”

The Late American Novel came out last week and may just be the most compelling collage-vision for the futue of publishing yet.

Kirstin Butler is writing an adaptation of Gogol for the Google era called Dead SULs, but when not working spends far, far too much time on Twitter. She currently lives in Cambridge, MA.

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