Category: words

Under the plan, which was approved this week by the boards of both organizations, the library — the nation’s fifth largest — will become the parent institute of the historical society. The society will remain in its landmark 1881 building in Brooklyn Heights, which houses nearly 100,000 books, manuscripts, photographs, maps and other rare items dating to the 17th century. – The New York Times

“When Rage Baking: The Transformative Power of Flour, Fury, and Women’s Voices dropped earlier this month, it was poised to become an instant hit. The anthology, a mix of recipes and essays about baking as an outlet for women’s political rage, is the latest in a series of books that address the organizing power of female anger, including Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad and Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her. However, Rage Baking is now on the receiving end of women’s anger over a controversy about who owns — and profits from — the concept of ‘rage baking.’ Here’s what you need to know.” – Slate

“These libraries are offering an alternative form of resistance, opening up platforms traditionally reserved for committed activists to waves of first-time protesters — from high school students to homemakers — who have joined hands against moves by the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to introduce a religious test for naturalized citizenship.” – OZY

“You can read Volume 1 online and Volume 2 should be dropping any day now.” The publication’s mission? “Taco Bell Quarterly is the literary magazine for the Taco Bell Arts and Letters. We’re a reaction against everything. The gatekeepers. The taste-makers. The hipsters. Health food. Artists Who Wear Cute Scarves. Bitch-ass Wendy’s. We seek to demystify what it means to literary, artistic, important, and elite.” – Literary Hub

“The Baltimore Afro-American newspaper sent him abroad to write ‘trench-coat prose’ about black Americans volunteering in the International Brigades. … Hughes’s 22 articles covered an angle no one else in the world was focused on as companies such as the Abraham Lincoln and Washington Brigades were not only integrated but featured Negro commanders leading white troops.” – Literary Hub

“This last question, though seemingly simple, resists every attempt to answer it. Every theory runs into brick walls of evidence, the research is limited, and even the basic understanding of what lipreading is, how effective it is, and how it works is laden with conflicting points of view.” – Atlas Obscura

But can anything? Between big multinational publishers with software aimed at the U.S. market – that doesn’t differentiate between U.S. and Canadian authors, for instance – and the emphasis of digital publishing on rewarding books that are already bestsellers, it’s a bit bleak for Canadian authors at the moment. – CBC

Here’s why it matters that a new Dickenson series feels so modern, and why it matters that new scholarship refutes the old lies about the poet. “If the ‘real’ person of Dickinson is translated and refracted through a pop-cultural idiom of hip hop and teen genre fiction, so much of the ‘real’ nineteenth century—of women’s domestic labor, of anti-immigrant electoral politics, of anti-black racism, of compulsory heterosexuality—can simply be imported. Because here we are, still living it.” – The Boston Review

Indeed, Ireland didn’t even get its own national poet or fiction laureate until 1998 and 2015, respectively. “Laureateships, like prizes and bursaries, recognise a coherent tradition built over time and reinforce a robust faith in the value of Irish literature as a category. Irish literature is now a term with clear meanings and resonances, institutionalised as an aspect of Irish life. … But the apparent certainty with which we now use the term should not blind us to its long birth across centuries of conflict and change.” – The Irish Times

But no one really knew it because her husband kept it one of her carefully guarded secrets. Now, “searching the archives for Amelia Earhart’s lost poems is a study in fragments—every tucked-away line on the back of a receipt hidden in a notebook an invitation to speculate on her thoughts. Even when her widower published pieces of her verse in his memoir, he had an independent source verify the authenticity of one of them, unsure if the private voice on the page was indeed hers.” – LitHub