While most of Dunbar's fiction was designed primarily to entertain his white readers, in the hands of Harper, Sutton E. Griggs, and Charles W. Chesnutt, the novel became an instrument of social analysis and direct confrontation with the prejudices, stereotypes, and racial mythologies that allowed whites to ignore worsening social conditions for blacks in the last decades of the 19th century.
Critical mass – the point at which there were enough eBook readers in the hands of the public to create a viable market for eBooks – seems to have been achieved somewhere between October and November 2010.
"Everyone who touches or takes a reader in their hand, they touch the screen," said Steve Haber, president of Sony's digital reading division.
I worry our kids won't be able to experience the visceral feel of the e-reader in their hand and that delicious "old e-reader" smell you get after storing it away for a few days.
All e-book reading feels a little disconnected to the habitual pen-in-hand reader, but some kind of digital marker, at least, gives a user fixed points of reference, a few colorful buoys in what would otherwise be a uniformly blank sea of words.
Like any other indignant reader, Shaw took pen in hand and wrote to his paper.
He always manages to return his reader to the matter in hand, even if the matter in hand only looks like that for a page or two.
"Like'm Headless" is just one of many letter-writers in "How to Make Love to a Cannibal," each presenting a new situation in which sex and death are linked, and by the end of the chapter, a reader will easily have in hand a general account of the circumstances in which sex finishes with a meal of one's mate.
This is all in the mind of the reader, with the book in hand, and then of the director, as he imagines it as a moving picture.
But this desire to prove the worth of some of those most unjustly savaged by readers went hand in hand with a more positive motive - to find new voices from unexpected places.
