Category: words

On a longlist packed with surprises and debuts, chosen from 162 novels, Mantel is up against major literary names including US author Anne Tyler, picked for Redhead by the Side of the Road, a work judges called “a very human tale of redemption”, as well as the Irish-American author Colum McCann, longlisted for Apeirogon, about a Palestinian and an Israeli, both of whom have lost their daughters. – The Guardian

Robust poems committed to memory can counteract the corrosive effects of self-pity. They can offer a different way of viewing the world, particularly to generations that did not suffer the buffetings of the early and mid-20th century, and are now bewildered by the calamities that seem to arise from nowhere, and leave them powerless. – The Atlantic

“A group of more than 80 science fiction and fantasy authors are protesting at the possibility of one of the genres’ biggest conventions being held in [Jeddah] in 2022, saying that ‘the Saudi regime is antithetical to everything SFF stands for’.” – The Guardian

“Those second looks have turned up several shared themes. One is a new skepticism regarding the relationship that has developed between the epic and prevailing ideas about male heroism. ‘A lot of toxic masculinity has been shaped by imperfect understandings of epic poetry,'” said Maria Dahvana Headley, translator of a new edition of Beowulf. “That result, she and [Aeneid translator Shadi] Bartsch agree, is a consequence of particular choices made in reading, not the substance of the epics themselves.” – The New York Times

It was called Bookman, started in 1895, and was the only place you could see which books were selling. “Once invented, the best seller could be discussed in literary journals, trade publications, social circles, and book clubs, solidifying a popular conception of what it meant to be a best seller and what it meant to read one.” – Lapham’s Quarterly

Tim Parks: “All of narrative fiction, I’ve suggested, can be sorted into four grand categories. Each presents a rich world of feeling in which any number of stories can be told and positions established, but always in relation to, or rather, driven by, a distinct cluster of values and consequent emotions. My claim is that it really is worth being aware which of these worlds we are being drawn into. We read better. We know where we are. And what the dangers are.” – New York Review of Books

“The ‘Theophrastan character’ is not often mentioned today, perhaps because it is so little known as a genre. Yet for centuries this was what ‘character’ meant in literature. A list of familiar social types compiled in the fourth century B.C. that chronicled human traits and foibles — from bore to boaster, cynic to coward — influenced the development of later fiction and drama, and remains sharply pertinent in psychology, journalism, cartoon art, and popular culture.” – The Paris Review

His work will appear next summer in his first published collection. Nadim does not write down his poems though. He dictates them. And that’s because Nadim doesn’t really read and write yet. After all, he’s only 4 years old. – NPR

Most writers have novels that never see the light of day. But 13? That’s serious dedication. The books were written over a decade while Sanderson was working as a night clerk at a hotel – a job chosen specifically because as long as he stayed awake, his bosses didn’t mind if he wrote between midnight and 5am. But publishers kept telling him that his epic fantasies were too long, that he should try being darker or “more like George RR Martin” (it was the late 90s, and A Song of Ice and Fire was topping bestseller charts). His attempts to write grittier books were terrible, he says, so he became “kind of depressed”. – The Guardian

Especially, it seems, the bookshelves of celebrities. Take Regina King: “Tupac Shakur Legacy, by Jamal Joseph: Curated by a family friend, this “interactive biography” of the rapper includes photos of Shakur’s home life and reproductions of handwritten lyrics.” – The New York Times