Mark Helprin rendered me temporarily silent with apoplexy when “A Great Idea Lives Forever. Shouldn’t Its Copyright?” appeared in Sunday’s Times. But the paralysis abated as the week progressed, and today I answer questions from Gawker’s Alex Balk. Balk admires Helprin’s fiction, but is “extremely wary of his political views, which can be found frequently on the op-ed page of . . .
A spoiler for Dickens fans reading the classics one PDA screen at a time: “It was also the worst of times.”
Newsweek Poland purports to expose late author and journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski as a communist spy.
What happens when the writer you admire most becomes your friend?: David Bezmozgis on Leonard Michaels.
Washington signed a 1790 law limiting U.S. copyright to 14 years, renewable once, but this fact does not deter Mark Helprin from his slippery, pseudo-originalist argument.