Category: words

An ABA survey from this summer found that some 20 per cent of members could go out of business, meaning hundreds of stores face closure, especially as government aid runs out. While the overall market for books has been surprisingly solid in 2020, Amazon.com has apparently fared best as the public increasingly makes purchases online. According to a report issued last week by the antitrust subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee, “Amazon accounts for over half of all print book sales and over 80% of e-book sales” in the U.S. market. – Toronto Star

“When he isn’t promoting books for W.W. Norton, Peter Miller, publicity director of Norton’s Liveright imprint, moonlights as the owner of Freebird Books, a small used bookstore he operates in Brooklyn. … A year after buying the store, Miller heard that Books Through Bars, which donates books to prison inmates around the country, needed a space for its collection operations.” – Publishers Weekly

Cory Doctorow: “This is the thought experiment of a thousand sci-fi stories: When the chips are down, will your neighbors be your enemies or your saviors? When the ship sinks, should you take the lifeboat and row and row and row, because if you stop to fill the empty seats, someone’s gonna put a gun to your head, throw you in the sea, and give your seat to their pals?” – Slate

“What doomed Lawrence, in the long run, was not an accusation of phallocentrism but his elevation to the canon. … It is because Lawrence’s own purpose was so big that his novels make such nerve-racking reads. His writing is most at ease when … it happens glancingly. Only when he is caught off guard does he catch the essence of divine otherness.” – The New Yorker

“From his vast reading, Carlos Lozada, who won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for criticism, has concluded that “the most essential books of the Trump era are scarcely about Trump at all.” Rather than works that focus on White House intrigue, scandals and policy disputes, he believes that the most important books today place our nation’s conflicts within the larger context of our “endless fight to live up to our self-professed, self-evident truths.” – Washington Post

John Hersey’s Hiroshima, first a 30,000-word article in The New Yorker, became a book almost immediately, and has sold millions of copies in many different languages since. But “one of the few places Hiroshima did not appear in the year after its initial publication was Russia. That changed this past August.” – The New York Times

The author of The Commitments misses Dublin pubs, says Ireland is nicer now – he doesn’t miss being denounced from the pulpit, for instance – and worries about what will happen to his writing, usually set in the present moment, if the present moment keeps changing rapidly due to the virus. – Irish Times

Depressingly, while fighting Franco – or not being organized enough to fight Franco – “George Orwell, whose book Homage to Catalonia became a celebrated account of fighting in the civil war, and his wife Eileen were spied on in Barcelona at the time of a vicious internal conflict on the Republican side of the war in May 1937.” – The Observer (UK)

Shafak, who says she can likely never return to Istanbul, says, “We do not give up on the places we love just because we are physically detached from them. Motherlands are castles made of glass. In order to leave them, you have to break something—a wall, a social convention, a cultural norm, a psychological barrier, a heart. What you have broken will haunt you. To be an emigré, therefore means to forever bear shards of glass in your pockets.” – LitHub

The Kenyan writer, a perennial frontrunner for the Nobel Prize for Literature, saw the committee pass him over once again. But his time in prison in Kenya changed his life. “How come that a post-colonial African government has put me in prison for writing in an African language? … I had written a few plays in English, and novels in English, and I had not been in prison for being critical of the post-colonial system. So why now? And that question is what set in motion my thinking about the unequal and unequal relationship of power between languages. That thinking made me say no — from now onwards, I’ll be writing in my mother tongue.” – NPR