Posts Tagged ‘span’

Don Paterson On Rain

September 23rd, 2009

Don Paterson on Rain

Don Paterson has won nearly every poetry prize that’s worth winning, and he will shortly learn if he can add the Forward best collection award to his tally.

He reads three poems from his new collection, Rain, moving from the intimacy of Correctives through the wry humour of Error to the tolling melancholy of the title poem.

He also explains why you can never trust poets to say what they mean, how he’s fascinated by the language of music technology, and what neuroscience is teaching poets who, like him, have one foot in the academy.

Claire Armitstead





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Live Like A King In The District

September 21st, 2009

This D.C. home offers lavish amenities for hosting the international elite.Live Like A King In The District


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Blockbuster May Close Us Stores As Dvd Rental Chains Struggle

September 18th, 2009

Blockbuster may close US stores as DVD rental chains struggle

DVD rental chain Blockbuster may close 960 of its US stores as competition from download and postal services increases

Its plan to defend itself against the onward march of movie rental websites by focusing on movie memorabilia from the likes of Top Gun and Men in Black was met with derision earlier this year. And yesterday Blockbuster announced it may close 960 of its 4,400 US stores in a move that looks likely to signal the beginning of the end for the DVD rental store as we know it.

In a regulatory filing, the company said it could close as many as 685 stores this year and 275 the following, according to the Hollywood Reporter. That would save about $30m a year for a company which has been struggling in the States in the face of competition from Netflix, a DVD rental service which operates via the post, and Redbox, which operates an automated kiosk-based rental service. Increasingly advanced movie download services from iTunes and other providers look set to make life even harder in the future and the company was named by usnews.com in February as one of the 15 firms that might not see out the year.

Blockbuster’s latest masterplan seem to be to ape Redbox by launching its own kiosk-based service: it is due to expand from 500 units to 10,000 over the course of the next year.

Ben Child

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds




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Stephen Fry Tweet Sends Book’S Sales Rocketing

September 14th, 2009

Stephen Fry tweet sends book's sales rocketing

Twitter endorsement from much-loved comedian boosts sales by 6,000% in a day

Read a story from the book that so wowed Fry here

Sales of David Eagleman’s book of short stories about the afterlife soared by 6,000% after Stephen Fry raved about it on Twitter.

Fry, who has more than 750,000 followers, tweeted yesterday that “You will not read a more dazzling book this year than David Eagleman’s ‘Sum’. If you read it and aren’t enchanted I will eat 40 hats.” The collection, which considers different versions of the afterlife, from a microbe-sized God unaware of humanity’s existence to an afterlife where the dead are split into all their different ages, subsequently shot to number two in Amazon’s bestseller charts.

Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives is not the first title to benefit from a plug on Twitter: in May, Jonathan Ross sent Jon Ronson’s The Men Who Stare at Goats racing up the book charts after he selected it for a Twitter book club. Publisher Canongate is now rushing through a major reprint of the Eagleman collection to meet demand. “It’s lovely when things come out of the blue,” said publisher Jamie Byng. “I knew Stephen was a huge fan of the book [but] the impact of his tweet is just amazing. It’s the ultimate word of mouth recommendation from someone [his followers] really trust, and from a publisher’s point of view it’s magical.”

Fans of the book also include Nick Cave and Jarvis Cocker, and Canongate is now planning an audiobook featuring Fry, Cave, Cocker and others reading individual stories. An event at the Sydney Opera House in June saw several of the stories set to an original score by Brian Eno, and a reading on 12 November at the Southbank Centre in London will include turns from Philip Pullman, Miranda Richardson, Cave and Cocker, among others.

Fry later tweeted that when he promised to eat 40 hats if his followers weren’t enchanted by Sum, he was actually referring to the word “hat” as meaning “cashew nut” in a rare Papuan dialect.

Alison Flood

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds





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