Category: words

Audre Lorde’s 1977 piece “Poetry Is not a Luxury” seems prescient right now. “Poems have alchemized death and imagined the continuation of lives cut short by racist violence. They’ve given texture to the ‘sudden strangeness’ of life brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, offering comfort to countless readers. In moments of uncertainty, poetry has illuminated bridges to the past—and shown how the act of remembering might alter the future.” – The Atlantic

Author Robin Stevens on writing for kids: “What book changed your life? What stories made you think about the world? I couldn’t tell you much about what was in most books I read last month but I can tell you every character in Howl’s Moving Castle. Eva Ibbotson’s morality has become mine, Diana Wynne Jones has influenced how I write, the way Terry Pratchett talks about society helped me think about all those things.”- The Guardian (UK)

In December of 2015, British novelist Ali Smith proposed an idea to her publishers: Four books in four years, as close to the time news events happened as possible. “I’d try to write one a year, deliver one a year. … If we did it like this, under time conditions, a kind of experiment sourced in cyclic time but moving forward through time simultaneously, it’d surely become about not just how story works but also how form, and society, and contemporary language itself – given that the novel form one way or another is always about all of these things – move and progress over a given time.” Wow, that given time. – The Guardian (UK)

Novelist Kathleen McMahon says she’s tired of flowers on publication day. “MacMahon says she does not like that writers are treated ‘like show ponies . . . I’m not comfortable with that. I’d prefer to be an equal professional at the table. Everybody is doing a different job. You do your job and I’ll do mine. I sound harsh but I think it actually makes me better to work with . . . I am not trying to make friends with anybody.'” – Irish Times

Not surprisingly, different readers had passionate (and passionately differing) opinions about their book collections and an essay recreating a cull. “While it is fine to move so-so books along, books love us and whisper their thoughts to us, as we pass their covers. Can an ereader do that? Trying to find a favorite phrase or vignette in an ebook is a time-wasting fraud. My real books fall open to what I need.” – Washington Post

Morgan Jerkins wanted to know more about where her people came from: “I hated the fact that I didn’t know much about land. I didn’t know about harvest, high tide, low tide, the levees, the dikes. I didn’t know about herbal remedies. I didn’t know anything.” Learning was a journey far beyond what the author and editor thought she already knew or ever would know. – NPR

Alyssa Cole, author of books about the Civil War and contemporary life, decided to write a thriller. One of the issues she has faced: “There are people who find the idea of Black people in love unbelievable, of Black people solving crime unbelievable, who seem to think people from marginalized groups are nonplayer characters who just wait around for something to happen to them.” – BuzzFeed

From woodblock printing (3rd century) to movable type (11th century — sorry, Gutenberg) to stereotyping (in the original sense; ca. 1700) to paperbacks (ca. 1845) to hot-metal typesetting (ca. 1884). – Lapham’s Quarterly

No, Dostoevsky’s novel is only the second-most popular title among inmates there; Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita is in the top spot, with Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo at number three. The data was released by Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service as part of a nationwide government program to encourage reading called “Books Are Your Friends.” – The Moscow Times

Controlled Digital Lending’s essential position is that it’s fine for a nonprofit like the archive or a library to scan a print copy of a book it owns, then lend that digital scan out on a one-copy-per-one-user basis. The print copy is to be unavailable while the digital copy is loaned, meaning that only one copy is out at a time in any format, and an author or publisher has the right to opt out of this by asking. Many rights holders have, indeed, asked to opt out because, as they see it, the user of a loaned digital copy of their book has paid nothing for that loan and this means copyright revenue has gone unpaid. – Publishing Perspectives