UR Read Online Free PDF

long, Cortland believed .
    Somewhere—at some college a lot more ambitious than Moore of Kentucky—there was a computer programmed to read books and identify the writers by their stylistic tics and tocks, which were supposed to be as unique as fingerprints or snowflakes. Wesley had a vague recollection that this computer program had been used to identify the author of a pseudonymous novel called Primary Colors ; the program had whiffled through thousands of writers in a matter of hours or days and had come up with a newsmagazine columnist named Joe Klein, who later owned up to his literary paternity.
    Wesley thought that if he submitted Cortland’s Dogs to that computer, it would spit out Ernest Hemingway’s name. In truth, he didn’t think he needed a computer.
    He picked up the Kindle with hands that were now shaking badly. “What are you?” he asked.
    The Kindle did not answer.
    III—Wesley Refuses to Go Mad
     
    In a real dark night of the soul , Scott Fitzgerald had said, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.
    At three o’clock on that Tuesday morning, Wesley lay feverishly awake, wondering if he might be cracking up himself. He had forced himself to turn off the pink Kindle and put it back in his briefcase an hour ago, but its hold over him remained every bit as strong as it had been at midnight, when he had still been deep in the UR BOOKS menu.
    He had searched for Ernest Hemingway in two dozen of the Kindle’s almost ten and a half million Urs, and had come up with at least twenty novels he had never heard of. In one of the Urs (it happened to be 6,201,949—which, when broken down, was his mother’s birth date), Hemingway appeared to have been a crime writer. Wesley had downloaded a title called It’s Blood, My Darling! , and discovered your basic dime novelcbut written in staccato, punchy sentences he would have  recognized anywhere.
    Hemingway sentences.
    And even as a crime writer, Hemingway had departed from gang wars and cheating, gore-happy debs long enough to write A Farewell to Arms . He always wrote A Farewell to Arms , it seemed; other titles came and went, but A Farewell to Arms was always there and The Old Man and the Sea was usually there.
    He tried Faulkner.
    Faulkner was not there at all, in any of the Urs.
    He checked the regular menu, and discovered that Faulkner was not available in what he was coming to think of as his reality, either, at least not in Kindle editions. Only a few books about American literature’s Count No’count.
    He checked Roberto Bolano, the author of 2666 , and although it wasn’t available from the normal Kindle menu, it was listed in several UR BOOKS sub-menus. So were other Bolano novels, including (in Ur 101) a book with the colorful title Marilyn Blows Fidel . He almost downloaded that one, then changed his mind. So many authors, so many Urs, so little time.
    A part of his mind—distant yet authentically terrified—continued to insist it was all an elaborate joke which had arisen from some degenerate computer programmer’s lunatic imagination. Yet the evidence, which he continued to compile as that long night progressed, suggested otherwise.
    James Cain, for instance. In one Ur Wesley checked, he had died exceedingly young, producing only two books: Nightfall (a new one) and Mildred Pierce (an oldie). Wesley would have bet on The Postman Always Rings Twice to have been a Cain constant—his ur-novel, so to speak—but no. Although he checked a dozen Urs for Cain, he found Postman only once. Mildred Pierce , on the other hand—which he considered very minor Cain, indeed—was always there. Like A Farewell to Arms .
    He had checked his own name, and discovered what he feared: although the Urs were lousy with Wesley Smiths (one appeared to be a writer of Westerns, another the author of porno novels such as Hot Tub Honey ), none seemed to be him. Of course it was hard to be a hundred per cent sure, but it appeared that he had stumbled