Category: words

The Booker list this year is dominated by books from American or U.S.-based authors, including “The Shadow King” by Ethiopia-born Maaza Mengiste, Diane Cook’s dystopian tale “The New Wilderness,” Avni Doshi’s India-set “Burnt Sugar” and Brandon Taylor’s campus novel “Real Life.” Only one British writer made the cut for the U.K.’s leading book prize. – Toronto Star (AP)

The laudable aim of encouraging brainy specialists to share their knowledge with the world at large has turned into a complete disaster. Why is the presence of an academic on a book prize judging panel, fronting a BBC Four arts documentary or even reviewing for a national newspaper generally such an embarrassment? – The Critic

Naturally, each character’s script is different, modeled by a calligrapher on surviving correspondence from England ca. 1800 and matched to each individual letter-writer in the novel by project curator Barbara Heller. (Elizabeth Bennet’s handwriting is copied from that of Austen herself.)
Here’s how Heller went about it. – Smithsonian Magazine

It’s not only Mantel: Anne Tyler and Colum McCann were also among the semifinalists who failed to advance. Of the six writers on the shortlist, four are women, four are nonwhite, and four, including one dual-national, are from the United States, a fact sure to incense those who still oppose the 2014 decision to open the Booker to any author writing in English and published in the UK. – The Guardian

Penned under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, Troubled Blood is Rowling’s fifth book to feature private investigator Cormoran Strike. An early review of the book by Telegraph writer Jake Kerridge described it as featuring a “transvestite serial killer,” which inspired readers’ anger and spawned the Twitter hashtag #RIPJKRowling — a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the author’s career. – CBC

English has some nouns and adjectives that apply strictly to one gender, but the languages descended from Latin are full of them, especially when referring to occupations. Here’s how some queer activists and linguists are trying to address that issue in Spanish (notably in Argentina), Portuguese, French, Italian, Catalan, and (trickiest of all) Romanian. – Global Voices

Americans in particular are small-talk artists. They have to be. This is a wild country. The most tenuous filaments of consensus and cooperation attach one person to the next. So the Have a nice days, the Hot enough for yous, the How ’bout those Metses—they serve a vital purpose. – The Atlantic

That, Doctorow explains, is because audiobooks sold through Audible must be bundled with copyright protection, or digital rights management (DRM) controls, whether authors or publishers want to include such restrictions or not. The DRM technology not only makes it harder to pirate audiobooks, but also restricts playback to devices and software authorized by Audible, which Amazon bought in 2008. – Fast Company

There’s the issue of not properly protecting workers in the pandemic. And in April, the Strand was approved for a PPP loan of $1–2 million to retain 212 jobs. Given that those jobs were not actually protected, workers in the store want to know where the money went. – The Baffler