The Paris Review

• When writers tweet from beyond the grave, they are strangely prolific.
• Chekhov, the (free) e-book. 
• Douglas Adams gets a Google Doodle on what would have been his sixty-first birthday, in other posthumous lit-tech news. 
• Neil Gaiman remembers the comic sci-fi legend. 
• Presented without comment: a Lego Hogwarts. 

Google is working with the Israel Antiquities Authority to put a number of ancient manuscripts online. Texts available at the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library include the earliest known copies of the book of Deuteronomy and part of the book of Genesis.

Genesis fragment: creation of the world.

Ten Commandments fragment

The Book of War, fragment

Web surfers will have noticed Google’s celebration of the Dracula scribe’s big 1-6-5 in today’s doodle. But the celebrations don’t end there: Galleycat has rounded up free Stoker e-books, while those across the pond enjoy a Bram Stoker Wedding. Enjoy an excerpt from the 1922 silent film version of Nosferatu:

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RV890, Norway 2011.

Toward the end of Lewis Carroll’s endlessly unfurling saga Sylvie & Bruno, we find the duo sitting at the feet of Mein Herr, an impish fellow endowed with a giant cranium. The quirky little man regales the children with stories about life on his mysterious home planet.

“And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!”
“Have you used it much?” I enquired.
“It has never been spread out, yet,” said Mein Herr. “The farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.”

Among Mein Herr’s many big ideas, none is as familiar to us as the Grand Map. We use it, or a version of it, on a daily basis. With Google Street View, which allows us to traverse instantly from a schematic road map into the tumult of the road itself, we boldly zoom from the map to the territory and back. As the Herr said, “we now use the country itself as its own map.” Read More »

James Joyce by Alex Ehrenzweig, 1915.

A cultural news roundup.