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Project Gutenberg founder dies

“What kind of a man wants to put the 10,000 most important books online by 2002 and make them available for free?” Late ’90s Wired article on Project Gutenberg founder Michael S. Hart, who died this week at 64.

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Muriel Spark on Mary Shelley: bring it back

Muriel Spark wrote a biography of Mary Shelley, Child of Light, that’s been out of print for years. Won’t someone revive it, as an ebook at least? This fan of both novelists would like to read it.

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The enigma of Joseph Heller

Blake Bailey admires aspects of Tracy Daugherty’s Joseph Heller biography but “can’t help thinking wistfully of what might have been” without the pressure to finish by Catch-22’s 50th anniversary.

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News on the street a century ago

The Whitney’s Lyonel Feininger show is full of delights: the little comic faces, the tiny village of rough-carved wooden houses and people, the eerie and magnificent evocation of twilight. For me the standout was “Newspaper Readers (1909),” above, which shows that getting your news on the run isn’t anything new. That’s exactly how I stare at my phone on the . . .

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