Where Did THAT Come From?

Posted on by Michael Kahn
Readers often ask, “Where did you get the idea for that story?” Most of the time, at least for me, the answer is, “I don’t know” or “I don’t remember.” But sometimes I do. The best example is the premise of my first novel, The Canaan Legacy (renamed Grave Designs in the paperback edition). That mystery opens with the…
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The 10 Best Lines in Literature: Let the Debate Begin

Posted on by Michael Kahn
The editors of The American Scholar–the quarterly publication of the Phi Beta Kappa Society–have published a piece on their website featuring their ten favorite sentences from fiction and nonfiction. Several were familiar, including one each from The Great Gatsby, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A Farewell to Arms, and Pride and Prejudice. My favorite of…
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3 Footnotes in a Tub: Score Another for Ecclesiastes

Posted on by Michael Kahn
A while back, I wrote a post on the topic of meta-fiction. Specifically, I discussed my naivete as to what I had assumed was the relatively recent vintage of that experimental genre and my subsequent astonishment at discovering that nearly five centuries before our current batch of meta-fiction hipsters Miguel de Cervantes had crafted the…
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Let Us Now Praise (In)famous Baz

Posted on by Michael Kahn
Great literature is the third rail of the motion picture industry. The director who attempts to adapt a beloved novel to the big screen invites the slings and arrows of outraged fans. One obvious reason is that the standard length of a motion picture is 100 minutes (or 100 script pages), which means that big chunks…
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The Joy of Porn Parodies: A Holiday Challenge

Posted on by Michael Kahn
When you think porn, I bet the first thing that pops up isn’t the Federal Antidilution Act. It is, however, if your day job is the practice of intellectual property law. Indeed, the intersection of porn, parody, and the First Amendment has inspired a holiday party challenge, described below. But first, a little legal background from your attorney-scribe,…
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