Category: words

This is especially true at (now-online) universities, reports Emma Pettit, for students and professors alike. And as professors find themselves unable to focus on the reading they need to do for their research, they’re becoming more understanding of their students’ difficulties — and their requests to ditch the textbooks for the rest of the semester. – The Chronicle of Higher Education

The latest analysis is computer-aided quantitative analysis of the texts. It’s revelatory (in a way), and it adds something to our understanding. But it doesn’t replace our previous close contextual study. – Times Literary Supplement

What’s clear to everyone is that the much celebrated “independent bookstore renaissance,” which coincided with the post–Great Recession economic expansion, is over. Hundreds of stores may never reopen again. The future of independent bookselling, a tenuous, low-margin business in the best of times, has never been gloomier. – The New Republic

Zadie Smith, Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie, Marilynne Robinson, Tayari Jones, and many more winners of what used to be the Orange Prize explain what it does. Ann Patchett: “Even now, I’ll be dusting in the living room and I’ll pick up that little statue and think about what a happy moment that was. My father is dead now, as are the elderly English cousins. I think about how happy they were that night. I had begged them not to come because I thought they’d be sad when I lost, but then I won and they were there. It was beautiful.” – The Guardian (UK)

Now is truly a time when the world could use an update to the beloved C.S. Lewis series. But only 75 copies of the sequel, written by a Narnia lover and scholar, exist. “It may never be conventionally published because Lewis’ work remains under copyright through 2034, and his estate has expressed no interest in authorizing it.” – Slate

Greenwell, the author of What Belongs to You and Cleanness, compares his new book to Schubert’s Winterreise and says, “It’s not that I think writing sex explicitly is in and of itself interesting, but that what interested me was the combination of sex with the kind of sentence I’m attracted to – a sentence with a history that comes through Proust and James and Woolf and Baldwin.” – The Guardian (UK)

The MinaLima Studio worked on the Potter movies, founded a popup gallery that has become permanent, and now designs not only the Fantastic Beast movies but also fairy tales and a variety of other books that are Potter-related. They didn’t quite know what they were getting into: “We were tasked by Harper Collins roughly 10 years ago to do a celebration book of Harry Potter and blindly said yes.” – The Observer (UK)

Says Claude Romano, a French philosopher, “One can be tempted to read in order to escape, but one can also read to fully inhabit the present moment and make it the space of a meditation.” That’s why he recommends a Japanese work called The Interminable Rain. – Le Monde

If you don’t want to be a covidiot, spend some of your quatorzaine at home boning up on the new words about Miss Rona, from the Chinese tagline for social distancing to the German term for sports played in empty stadiums (and the one for the weight fans at home are putting on) to the metaphor for hoarding that a Dutch sign language interpreter came up with on the fly. – 1843 Magazine

“The novelist is to be a guest on Mary Beard’s BBC Two arts show Front Row Late, hosted in lockdown from the study in Beard’s house. Atwood’s contribution is what Beard calls a ‘very surprising’ version of Poe’s horror story: a puppet show choreographed by the author and her sister Ruth, with all the characters made from household objects.” – The Guardian