Category: words

“It makes me crazy reading sloppy, typo-strewn copy. Ditto for readers, as has been made clear by the hundreds of emails I receive complaining about errors and inexcusable typos. The takeaway is that we just don’t care enough to give every story a good shake.” – Toronto Star

Patchett, author of Bel Canto and State of Wonder (and the new The Dutch House): “It was a funny thing to throw a book out. People seemed much more upset about it than I was. Some people said, It must be like a death! It was nothing like a death. It was like burning a cake. You know that feeling? Oh, hell, I burned the cake. Then you cut the cake open and eat the little pieces in the middle that aren’t completely ruined, then you bake another cake.” – LitHub

The author of White Teeth and Swing Time says we should all read a 700-page nonfiction book about technology and capitalism. “If a book’s importance is gauged by how effectively it describes the world we’re in, and how much potential it has to change said world, then in my view it’s easily the most important book to be published this century.” – The Guardian (UK)

They’re thinking we don’t have a choice; we must adapt. But “while everyone is experiencing the effects of climate change, it’s easy to write ‘Our undoing is also the making of our becoming’ when the ocean isn’t lapping at your front door.” – The Atlantic

Not that Woodson hasn’t written for adults – she has. She’s written memoir, poetry, prose, essays, and just about everything else for every age, including a recent picture book that grew out of a book of young adult poetry that grew out of her great-grandfather’s experiences. She’s won just about every prize there is to win in children’s and youth literature, including a prize that’s allowing her to found an organization that will give fellowships to emerging writers of color. And now, in her novels, she’s turning to a reckoning with the present and the past. – The New York Times

All five longlists rolled out this week. Are you ready to read 10 books in each of the categories? Get your poetry, nonfiction, fiction, translated fiction, and young people’s literature reading caps on (or just wait for the lists to be winnowed to five in October … or one apiece when the awards are announced). – NPR

Nina Revoyr’s books “juxtapose the jambalaya of Los Angeles’s people, neighborhoods, cultures, and social classes into complicated stories that surprise at every turn, entertain, and then illuminate the ever-present beauty of the city.” – Los Angeles Review of Books

The just-published, unfinished 200-page volume, titled The Four Corners of the Heart and described as “a laconic dissection of the lives of the French haute bourgeoisie,” is the big news of this year’s rentrée litteraire, the post-summer “return” which is the height of the book-publishing year in France. – Yahoo! (AFP)

“Almost certainly more than any other media in our country, literary magazines model critical thinking and arrange an exposure to the unorthodox, both of which can provide inoculations against where we seem to be headed as a collective. They assist in that crucial rear-guard holding action on both reading and writing’s behalf.” – Literary Hub