Category: words

And just in time – a lot of the “dream cast” for the documentary is aging, with at least one collector/vendor/devotée dying before the documentarians could get to work. “The profession is driven by equal parts commerce, scholarship and sheer love.” – The New York Times

Seriously, this book has a lot of endings. – Sri Lanka Mirror

Karen Russell: “When I fixate on this math, I begin to have the panicked sense that I gave up time with my son to delete three paragraphs; suddenly writing badly feels like stealing from him. This is obviously not a healthy way to approach creative work, or a pressure that yields good fiction.” Way to go, USA! – Wealthsimple

Hachette executives had discussed the matter with its employees and, “after listening, we came to the conclusion that moving forward with publication would not be feasible for HBG.” – The New York Times

Camus’s The Plague follows the inhabitants of Oran, an Algerian town that is sealed off by quarantine as it is ravaged by bubonic plague. Penguin is rushing through a reprint of its English translation to meet demand, but said on Thursday it had sold out of stock on Amazon. The publisher added that sales in the last week of February were up by 150% on the same period in 2019. – The Guardian

Alex Ross revisits that odd period when the Nazi regime had driven the cream of pre-war German arts and letters — Werfel, Döblin, Viertel, Brecht, Adorno, three different Manns, along with composers, actors, and stage and film directors — into a disorienting exile under the palms. – The New Yorker

“Now that it’s public, it’s still not clear why the parties sought to keep the settlement terms private in the first place, other than the fact that NDAs and confidentiality agreements have become the default for Audible’s parent company, Amazon. Beyond the revelation of the settlement containing payments from Audible, the settlement is brief, and its 18 terms are simple, standard, and straightforward.” – Publishers Weekly

It’s surely axiomatic that the greater the prolificacy of the writer, the greater his or her capacity for self-plagiarism. This has to be one of the principal reasons why we admire such productivity rather less than classical economics implies we should; another is embodied in Mark Twain’s witty cynicism: “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead”. – Times Literary Supplement

Lili Loofbourow: “We don’t have much of a vocabulary for what happens in a victim’s life after the painful past has been excavated. … What is the situation of survivors who saw the injury proven and exposed — and maybe even punished — and saw, also, that nothing much changed? I am curious about their vision of things. I want to know how they think things should be. In nonfiction, we have [Chanel Miller’s] Know My Name. In fiction, we have books like Miriam Toews’s Women Talking and Rachel Cline’s The Question Authority.” – The New York Review of Books

It is unclear how much ViacomCBS, which has owned the publisher for more than 25 years, might fetch from the sale. Book publishing is no longer a growth business but its revenue has been relatively stable in recent years. Simon & Schuster has some of the world’s most recognizable authors, including Mary Higgins Clark, Doris Kearns Goodwin and David McCullough. – Los Angeles Times