Yet the Doyle estate used those late stories as a wedge, arguing that it retained licensing rights for all works featuring Holmes and Watson during the remaining quarter of a century before the final tales—widely seen as the worst of the bunch—fell out of copyright. Their claim: The characters didn’t assume their definitive form until the series was complete. The estate based its argument on a distinction between “flat” and “round” fictional characters first proposed by E. M. Forster in his 1927 book, Aspects of the Novel, a concept frequently invoked in high-school literature classes but never previously tested in court.
I love some good historical fiction, but there’s something particularly ominous about a story in which contemporary people have problems that could only happen today. A good thriller blows up the problem to monster proportions, but hopefully, it also says: hey, you see this thing we all rely on? Here’s how it can suddenly become a disaster. Our phones solve problems, but they can also turn on us.
Ask Me Again, the first novel by American short story writer Clare Sestanovich, is structured around a series of questions. Each chapter title is a kind of inquiry: Did You See That?; Can You Feel That?; Can I Tell You Something? It’s a simple device, but it creates an atmosphere of interrogative uncertainty I last felt when reading Carol Shields’s Unless, a book in which adverbs, prepositions and conjunctions serve as chapter headings: Therefore; Instead; Despite. The isolated events that make up a life are connected less by tight plot lines than by little fragments of language and the hunger for connection they represent.
Author Liz Pelly lays out the sordid history of the streaming service Spotify in Mood Machine. It would be comforting to believe that the corporate actions described here represented a culmination of the depredations that technology wreaked on the arts. Unlikely. Not unless we (the body politic) thoroughly reevaluate our tolerance for surveillance and our laissez-faire attitude toward fairly paying musicians. And, oh yes, unless the capitalist system is dismantled.
In Islamesque, cultural historian Diana Darke sets out to show Islamic art’s influence on Europe’s Romanesque monasteries, churches and castles, via a very similar story of surprising borrowings and occasional thefts.