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Jonathan Franzen (born August 17, 1959) is an American novelist and essayist. His third novel, The Corrections (2001), a sprawling, satirical family drama, drew widespread critical acclaim, earned Franzen a National Book Award, and was a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His most recent novel, Freedom, was published in August 2010.
He is known for his 1996 Harper's essay "Perchance to Dream" bemoaning the state of literature, and for the 2001 controversy surrounding the selection of The Corrections for Oprah Winfrey's book club. In October 2010, Franzen declared in an inte...
Thomas Kennerly "Tom" Wolfe, Jr. (born March 2, 1931, although his Who's Who entry gives his date of birth as March 2, 1930) is a best-selling American author and journalist. He is one of the founders of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
Early life
Wolfe was born in Richmond, Virginia to Thomas Kennerly Wolfe, Sr. and Helen Hughes Wolfe. His father had received a Ph.D. from Cornell University and was a professor of agronomy at Virginia Tech. He also owned two farms and was the director of a successful farmer's cooperative. Wolfe Sr.'s success as a businessman afforded ...
Larry Jeff McMurtry (born June 3, 1936) is an American novelist, essayist, bookseller and screenwriter whose work is predominantly set in either the old West or in contemporary Texas. He is known for his 1985 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Lonesome Dove, a historical saga that follows ex-Texas Rangers as they drive their cattle from the Rio Grande to a new home in the frontier of Montana, and for co-writing the adapted screenplay for Brokeback Mountain. Lonesome Dove was adapted into a television miniseries.
Early life
McMurtry was born in Archer City, Texas, the son of Hazel Ruth (née McIv...
Philip Kindred Dick (December 16, 1928 – March 2, 1982) was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist whose published work is almost entirely in the science fiction genre. Dick explored sociological, political and metaphysical themes in novels dominated by monopolistic corporations, authoritarian governments and altered states. In his later works Dick's thematic focus strongly reflected his personal interest in metaphysics and theology. He often drew upon his own life experiences in addressing the nature of drug abuse, paranoia and schizophrenia, and transcendental experiences...
Hard science fiction is a category of science fiction characterized by an emphasis on scientific or technical detail, or on scientific accuracy, or on both. The term was first used in print in 1957 by P. Schuyler Miller in a review of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Islands of Space in Astounding Science Fiction. The complementary term soft science fiction (formed by analogy to "hard science fiction") first appeared in the late 1970s as a way of describing science fiction in which science is not featured, or violates the scientific understanding at the time of writing.
The term is formed by analo...
Schild's Ladder is a 2002 science fiction novel by Australian author Greg Egan. The book derives its name from Schild's ladder, a construction in differential geometry, devised by the mathematician and physicist Alfred Schild. This novel is perhaps the hardest science fiction ever published by Egan, filled with non-trivial mathematics and theoretical physics.
Plot summary
Twenty-thousand years in the future, Cass, a humanoid physicist from Earth, travels to Mimosa orbital station and begins a series of experiments to test the extremities of the fictitious Sarumpaet rules, a set of fund...
About two years ago I saw this quote in Newsweek, where it was attributed to Karl Marx:
Sell a man a fish, he eats for a day, teach a man how to fish, you ruin a wonderful business opportunity.
Inspired by this, I now ask you: did Marx really say this?
What is the origin of the term 'til the cows come home? While discussing this with friends tonight, the group had two possible explanations:
Cows return to their barn for milking at a given time late each night.
If a cow runs away or escapes, it doesn't return, unlike horses, which will return ...
The porbeagle (Lamna nasus) is a species of mackerel shark in the family Lamnidae, distributed widely in the cold and temperate marine waters of the North Atlantic and Southern Hemisphere. In the North Pacific, its ecological equivalent is the closely related salmon shark (L. ditropis). The porbeagle typically reaches in length and a weight of ; North Atlantic sharks grow larger than Southern Hemisphere sharks and differ in coloration and aspects of life history. Gray above and white below, the porbeagle has a very stout midsection that tapers towards the long, pointed snout and the...
Lo smeriglio (Lamna nasus (Bonnaterre, 1788)), conosciuto anche come "vitello di mare", per la sua lunghezza (3,6 m) è considerato una delle specie più piccole dei Lamnidi. Tuttavia il suo peso si attesta intorno ai 500 kg.
I colori della specie variano dal grigio-blu al marrone con macchie bianche. È dotato di una carena secondaria, situata alla base della coda.
Comportamento
Diffuso nei mari freddi fino alla profondità di 370 metri, si nutre di sgombri, calamari e merluzzi; caratteristico è il fatto che, per riuscire a respirare, deve nuotare costantemente.
Termoregolazione
Pesce a...
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http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE5D7163EF93BA35750C0A96E948260 I believe the reason is that, in Japanese at least, there is no Western L sound, therefore a native Japanese person won't learn to pronounce it (at least the Western way) at an early age. In my Japanese language g...
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Elendil is a fictional character in J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium. He appears in The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales.
Known as Elendil the Tall (Tolkien put his height at "more than man high by nearly half a ranga", almost 8' or 240 cm), Elendil the Faithful ('Elendil Voronda' or 'Vorondo') or Elendil the Fair, he was the father of Isildur and Anárion, last lord of Andúnië, and the first High King of Arnor and Gondor.
Literature
Elendil is first introduced in The Fellowship of the Ring.
He was born in 3119 of the Second Age in Núme...
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I suggested in a comment here that single-word-request is a meta-tag and perhaps should be deleted.
The blog entry on meta-tags quoted this:
The reason meta-tags are a problem is that they do not describe the content of the question. They describe some other aspect of the question, like the ...
The russian proverb "За битого - двух небитых дают" is translated in wiki as
"Who has never tasted bitter, knows not what is sweet".
I do not find this equivalent to be well-turned to convey the original spirit and meaning. The literal phrase is something like: "One defeated (beaten) is excha...
The following sentence is one eminent speaker
"It is difficult to use, three times consecutively, in a sentence the word because because because is a conjunction" - C. N. Annadurai
Please post the sentences that you found interesting
Proposal: CMS & Blog Engines
First read http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/69876/
I think we should merge these:
http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/22662/umbraco-cms
http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/15362/dotnetnuke
http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/18767/comp...
Snail is a common name for almost all members of the molluscan class Gastropoda that have coiled shells in the adult stage. When the word is used in a general sense, it includes sea snails, land snails and freshwater snails. Otherwise snail-like creatures that lack a shell (or have only a very small one) are called slugs.
One species of land snail, the Giant African Snail, can grow to be from snout to tail, and weigh . The largest living species of sea snail is Syrinx aruanus which has a shell that can measure up to in length, and the whole animal with the shell can weigh up to .
...
Slug is a common name that is normally applied to any gastropod mollusc that lacks a shell, has a very reduced shell, or has a small internal shell. This is in contrast to the common name snail, which is applied to gastropods that have coiled shells that are big enough to retract into.
Slugs belong to several different lineages that also include snails with shells. The shell-less condition has arisen many times independently during the evolutionary past, and thus the category "slug" is emphatically a polyphyletic one. The various groups of land slugs are not closely related, despite a...
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English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…
Not for the faint of heart or those easily triggered by Englis...
