Category: words

“As it currently stands, the publishing industry largely serves the interests of the wealthiest higher-ups, and that is the entire reason for any financial strain on publishers without the capital of a corporation. The larger publishers could easily take the risks that smaller publishers do. The only reason for smaller presses to be working with less is because that’s simply how the system has been engineered to function.” – Electric Lit

“The primary lesson of plague literature, from Thucydides onwards, is how predictably humans respond to such crises. Over millennia, there has been a consistent pattern to behaviour during epidemics: the hoarding, the panicking, the fear, the blaming, the superstition, the selfishness, the surprising heroism, the fixation with the numbers of the reported dead, the boredom during quarantine.” – The Guardian

“We are the literary magazine for Taco Bell literature. I also say celebrating the Taco Bell arts and letters. We’re not a gimmick, we’re not a viral sensation. We are real fiction, real essays, real poetry, real art, inspired by Taco Bell.” – Vox

“The hosts [of the radio show A Way with Words], Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett, are the Click and Clack of word talk. Barnette is a writer who has studied Latin and Greek (her books include A Garden of Words), and Barrett is a linguist and lexicographer with an ear for contemporary slang. They make a perfect duo. The show is modelled after Car Talk, though it is broadcast from San Diego, not Cambridge: the hosts laugh a lot, and when people call in they answer by saying, ‘You have a way with words,’ which is always nice to hear.” – The New Yorker

The Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District in Alaska “cited ‘sexually explicit material’ and ”anti-white’ messaging’ in [Maya Angelou’s] I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, … [and] language and sexual references in [F. Scott Fitzgerald’s] The Great Gatsby. … The other books on the list — Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller and The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien — were judged to be inappropriate because they contained mentions of rape, incest, racial slurs, profanity and misogyny.” – The New York Times

Yes, she’s been dead for 34 years. She started writing the book, titled The Inseparables and based on her best friend (who died at 21), in 1954, the year she won the Prix Goncourt for The Mandarins and five years after she published The Second Sex. Jean-Paul Sartre, her partner, was unimpressed with the novel, and de Beauvoir put it aside. Scholars wondered what had happened to it; turns out she had kept the manuscript and typescript in her archives. – The New York Times

“Bookshop launched in January with the intention of offering independent bookstores an improved online commerce hub that will help them woo customers away from Amazon. … The site has seen a 2,000% increase in sales in the past month compared to the month before and has become a lifeline for many stores that have been temporarily closed by the Covid-19 pandemic. … Despite its success, the site has critics.” – Publishers Weekly

The modern idea of “Shakespeare,” both as artist and ideal genius, was essentially an eighteenth-century creation, though it is often credited to the Romantics. – Hudson Review

Axel Sheffler is used to being alone at home as he works on illustrating books. But his publisher had heard from a teacher friend that kids weren’t doing as well. The result: A swiftly published, free book with facts and honesty about what we know and don’t know about social distancing and more. “Like all good children’s stories, the book ends on a positive note. There’s a picture of families, doctors and nurses celebrating together and the caption reads: ‘One day this strange time will be over.'” – BBC

The alt-right troll army has found, and targeted, the author of a book about abuse. She says, “I knew the book needed to be written – but I didn’t know it needed to be written this badly. The targeted attacks from men in the last week have been appalling. I will always centre women in my work and I will keep making misogynists uncomfortable.”  – The Guardian (UK)