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Austin Allen
Austin Allen is the editor of the Poetry Genius project at Rap Genius, as well as a former editor at Big Think. He holds an MFA in poetry from Johns Hopkins University, where he has also taught as a creative writing instructor. He lives in New York City and can be reached at austin [at] bigthink [dot] com.
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My post attributing the death of Borders to Amazon’s sales tax advantage raised some hackles among commenters and fellow bloggers alike. Matthew Nisbet over at Age of Engagement countered that the reasons […]
Earlier this summer I was feeling down in the dumps about libraries. I was spending the month of June in Flushing, Queens, a melting-pot neighborhood where the local library bustles […]
Joseph Heller’s Catch-22turns fifty this year, and like its hero Yossarian, it seems destined to survive for the long haul. It’s the best kind of literary paradox: a classic that […]
Most people know that Emily Dickinson was a great poet, but it takes a deep plunge into her collected poems to realize just how staggeringly great she was. Usually represented […]
So Borders is gone for good, its last four hundred stores scheduled to vanish within weeks. As mourners rush to the liquidation sales, it’s worth pausing to ask: what the […]
A century after its publication as The Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce’s comic lexicon remains a beautifully nasty piece of work. Though it’s a work of satire first and foremost, its […]
As print sales decline and new e-platforms pop up everywhere, the future of the book has become a source of widespread speculation. In my previous post I asked: what’s the […]
With e-books now outselling print titles on Amazon.com, the book business is undergoing its most radical transformation in living memory. Everyone and their literate cat has an opinion about what the […]
“Blessed be the man that spares these stones, / And cursed be he who moves my bones,” Shakespeare’s gravestone famously proclaims. Anthropologist Francis Thackeray, the man currently petitioning the Anglican […]
In her introductory video for “Pottermore,” the recently unveiled web portal for all things Potter, J. K. Rowling promises an enhanced multimedia experience for “the digital generation.” She also announces […]
“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” Percy Shelley wrote in 1821. Not surprisingly, this claim has earned some snickers from people who think of poets as barely able […]
A book, any book, is for us a sacred object. Cervantes, who probably did not listen to everything that everyone said, read even “the torn scraps of paper in the […]