Twitterbag 4

Every now and then we rescue some fish from the Twitter stream. Here are a few more from recent tweets ...

• A very good blog post by Anthony Wilson on the nature of 'failure' in writing, and here's another with particular interest to teachers, especially English teachers: Teaching Paying Attention, with a link to an excellent piece by Anne McCrary Sullivan.
• Our own report on Claire Keegan's thoughts about her superb story 'Foster'.
• An online magnetic poetry kit (of course, you could just use your fridge door).
• Thoughts by Seth Godin on privacy (or, rather, its lack) in our world.
• Find the cliche.
• Handy: characters who die in Shakespeare's plays.
• Danah Boyd's book It's Complicated: the social lives of networked teens is a free PDF.
• Our list of 18 excellent iOS apps for English teaching and learning has been updated with 'The Dead' - including a full audio version by Barry McGovern. 
• Wes Anderson's film The Grand Budapest Hotel is great fun. It (its milieu at least) was inspired by the work of the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig. A fine novel on Zweig's end in Brazil is published by the excellent Pushkin Press: The Last Days by Laurent Seksik.
• And while we're on Pushkin Press - Maxim Leo's Red Love is a fascinating read about the GDR (read it in conjunction with Anna Funder's superb Stasiland).
• Willy Vlautin is a terrific writer. His new novel The Free has just been published.
• House of Cards (starring Kevin Spacey) and its relationship to Shakespeare's dramas.
• One for teachers: How to use Google as a countdown timer. 
• Jo Baker's novel Longbourn (Pride and Prejudice from the servants' perspective) is recommended.
• 200 prompts for argumentative writing.
• A fine Transition Year essay comparing books by Mark Haddon, Lionel Shriver and Andrew Motion.