Story and video over at Monocle: "Less is more is the concept for Bildschöne Bücher, a small bookshop in Berlin that has grown out of the highly successful website 25books.com . "

A librarian fighting evildoers! How could we resist this one: "Follow the story of Rex Libris, the tough-as-nails Head Librarian at Middleton Public Library, and his unending struggle against the forces of darkness. Wearing his distinctive, super thick bottle glasses and armed with an arsenal of powerful weapons, he strikes fear into recalcitrant borrowers, and can take on virtually any foe‹from noisy, loitering zombies to fleeing alien warlords who refuse to pay their late fees."

Check out the strip over here!

Includes recordings made between 1971 and 1987. Books excerpted on the box set include JUNKY, THE SOFT MACHINE, THE WILD BOYS, NOVA EXPRESS, CITIES OF THE RED NIGHT and NAKED LUNCH.
THE BEST OF WILLIAM BURROUGHS was nominated for the 1999 Grammy Award for Best Boxed Recording Package.

Torrent at Greylodge

"New ideas pass through three periods: it can't be done, it probably can be done, but it's not worth doing, and I knew it was a good idea all along!"
- Arthur C. Clarke

Wired
The Arthur C. Clark Foundation
Home to all things Clarkean

OK forget the new Star Wars film, forget Indiana Jones, and forget the new Star Trek film click HERE for the great 70's comeback we all have been waiting for

Where readers and writers click: Bookreporter.com

check out Eric Hobsbawm´s Diary in the London Review of books on Weimar Germany

Red Room - Where the Writers Are: "Through original, author-generated content, we offer a trustworthy and creative social network unlike any other. Here, you can connect with your favorite authors, access current industry news, and comment on engaging features. By fostering true community between authors and readers, Red Room showcases esteemed writers and inspires the next generation."

Techcrunch: "In Japan, half of the top ten selling works of fiction in the first six months of 2007 were composed on mobile phones."

Winner of the 1977 Guardian Fiction Prize

Ok, it's Book 4 of The Jerry Cornelius Saga and maybe you better start with the first one, but I just reread this one and it's still a very impressive piece of work. Moorcock is still one of the greatest writers out there.

'The Condition of Muzak considers the process of living as a harlequinade and is, for me, a most moving summation... Here we move through Mr Moorcock's obsessions, the serials of Fantomas, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Arthurian legend, through chronos-zones - behold the pun! - to bi-sexuality, with a small sideswipe at Stanley Kubrick on the way. The realisation comes that Jerry is seeking sanctuary in different universes of Time in separate private mythologies. As indeed, is the implication, are we all.'
-TOM HUTCHINSON, THE TIMES

Excellent article by the old man himself. Uhura, could you please bookmark this for the Captain?

Excerpts:

"Though certain techniques borrowed from commercial science fiction and fantasy, have been employed in the mainstream, they have primarily worked to supply a spark of life to existing popular forms as, for instance, magic was introduced to the old-fashioned English school story to give us Harry Potter. I believe that the success of The Lord of the Rings is symptomatic of middle-brow conservatism in reading. Fundamentally, such books, with, say, Martin Amis’s current output, are generic, quite as rigid in what they can say or try to say as the popular generic work of Ian Rankin or Iain Banks. Indeed, apart from Iain Sinclair, fewer and fewer technically ambitious novelists are published in the UK mainstream and even those associated with innovation seem to have fallen back on self-imitation. Only in America do a few ambitious novelists such as Roth, DeLillo, Eggers and Chabon continue to offer work questioning middle-brow assumptions and finding a broad readership but even in America is a tendency to return to safer and more predictable forms. If, as I believe, the medium is the message, this means that in conventional publishing we see little in the way of innovative ideas or analysis and are forced increasingly to search through the internet to find small print publishers, POD publishers and those publishing direct to the web, few of whom can afford to pay an author a reasonable advance.


(...)

It seems to me that authors as well as publishers will have to take the same risks Dickens took when he published his books as cheap part-works, the same risks authors took when they let their books be published at six shillings, instead of ₤1.10.6d, the same risks some of us took when we ignored the posher literary magazines of our day and preferred to see our work appear in vulgar newstand magazines with exotic and brightly coloured covers. At present POD and other electronic publishing are considered by literary journalists and others to be an inferior form of delivering fiction to readers, on a par with vanity publishing. This can only change rapidly if we make it change. In my view we should not merely be seeking new markets for existing forms of fiction, such as the short story. We should be seeking personal forms of expression taking risks equal to those of electronic publishers who present us with the means of reaching a growing popular public."

Via that hip multimedia-writer from England

Another one of those books 2.0 projects: "Enter a book you like and the site will analyse our database of real readers'
favourite books (over 32,000 and growing) to suggest what you could read next."

What Should I Read Next?

They're also working on a FILM & MUSIC SITE.

Some really cool books!