Category: words

Publishers submitted a total of 1,692 books for this year’s National Book Awards: 388 in Fiction, 609 in Nonfiction, 254 in Poetry, 130 in Translated Literature, and 311 in Young People’s Literature. – National Book Awards

The written word wielded power in part because of the rarity of the skills required to comprehend it, let alone compose in it. In the later Middle Ages, books were produced in increasing quantities for increasingly diverse audiences, but even then, as earlier, in Christendom, literacy was always the reserve of the few. – Lapham’s Quarterly

Katherine Gaudet on trying to make children into lifelong readers: “I teach humanities courses to undergraduates; I facilitate reading groups at public libraries; I have seen over and over how engagement with literature leads to understanding, empathy, and exploration. What I don’t believe in anymore is the moral undertone of reading promotion: that people who read for pleasure are more good and more deserving than those who don’t.” – Literary Hub

The prize has been mired in scandal since November 2017, when the Swedish Academy, which selects the winner, was caught up in sexual abuse and financial misconduct allegations, which resulted in the conviction of Jean-Claude Arnault, husband of academy member Katarina Frostenson, for rape in 2018. The following January, Frostenson left the Academy after she was found to be the source of leaks of previous winners. The Nobel was postponed in 2018 in the wake of the controversy, but found itself fiercely criticised again over its choice of Peter Handke as winner in 2019. – The Guardian

“I’m really against translating or editing foreign speakers’ texts into seamless English. Not only because I know this disadvantage as a second language speaker (and writer) who has a hard time expressing the same ideas in a different medium. But also because any meaning carried by a given text is strongly nuanced by the author’s linguistic choices.” – Eurozine

Sherlock Holmes was first introduced to Chinese readers in 1896, with translations of four stories appearing in Current Affairs newspaper. So popular were they with readers that in 1916 the Zhonghua Book Company published The Complete Stories of Sherlock Holmes, featuring 44 stories that rendered Conan Doyle’s prose into classical Chinese. Los Angeles Review of Books

“What some studies have found is that people are actually more likely to use euphemisms to save face socially than in consideration of the feelings of others. This, coupled with the desire to sound neutral, objective, and authoritative, can lead journalists to use euphemistic language to reframe a story obliquely, even when the facts themselves are indisputable.” (For instance, collateral damage or officer-involved shooting or misrepresentation.) “Such tentative reporting not only reveals hidden biases and value judgments, it also can fall into ethical traps that have real-world and legal repercussions.” – JSTOR Daily

“[Considering] this great variety of materials and uses that define books over some 5,000 years and in every part of the globe, … how adventurous can we be in attributing to material objects — from clay to digital tablets — the characteristics which make them books? … And as forms of print and print in conjunction with script and illustration increased in complexity, how catholic does our definition of ‘book’ become? Do we include maps and sheets of music, fold-out panoramas, and gathered-together illustrations and prints?” – Literary Hub

The beach or the park succeeds based on the willingness of everyone who enters to uphold commonly accepted expectations. Maintenance of the space becomes reflexive, a civic habit that is self-reinforcing: When you enter a beautiful space, you are inclined to keep it beautiful, no public shaming required. Unfortunately, the inverse is also true. If it isn’t a beautiful space, then most people aren’t inclined to keep it beautiful. And when these conditions begin to prevail, public spaces fail, often precipitously. – Washington Post