Category: words

Kathleen Parker: “Once Cummins’s genetic shortcomings caught the attention of social media’s literati, it was off to the bonfires. Not only was she condemned, prompting her to cancel her book tour in fear for her safety, but a petition was circulated asking Oprah Winfrey to remove Cummins’s novel from her book-club list.” – Washington Post

“When I set out to write this novel, which takes place in Iowa and centers around 46-year-old Meradyth Spensir and her 8-year-old son Chab, my goal was to shed light on the struggles that white middle-aged women in America face — struggles that I, a 28-year-old Latino man, don’t know much about but I would imagine are pretty tough. And as far as I’m concerned, I freaking nailed it.” – McSweeney’s

Author Naomi Ishiguro: “I’ve always enjoyed the idea of total mundanity, and the struggles and the happinesses of ordinary life, and then contrasting it with something a bit strange; the possibility of magic in the everyday.” – The Guardian (UK)

The book isn’t due to be published until June in English translation. The writer Martha Cooley asks her husband to read the novel – a first-person account by a woman – to her. “Low in pitch and volume, his voice is distinctly male. He doesn’t have a Neapolitan accent but a northern Italian one. Sometimes I have to ask him to speak up, or to slow down; it’s easy for him to gain speed without realizing it. Now and then he’ll stop reading, realizing he’s just botched a sentence’s syntax. Returning to the start, he’ll reread the sentence slowly, and I can hear where he went wrong.” – Los Angeles Review of Books

Let Ivan Brunetti break it down for you: Comics are “an incantation beckoning us to enter their world. The simplicity of their superficial concision can reveal surprising density, layers, and multivalence.” – Paris Review

They’re not at all the same – and the internet is more distracting from books than TV is – but: “As with classic unread novels, certain TV shows have begun to carry with them a hint of obligation. There are so many shows that people assure me are really good, really smart, really fun, shows like Breaking Bad and Borgen and Schitt’s Creek. Then there are the documentaries that promise to teach history: Ken Burns’s Vietnam, Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us, Ken Burns’s Country Music, OJ: Made in America—actually, I did watch OJ, and it was incredible. I would like to watch it again. But then I’d like to read Middlemarch again, too.” – The Millions

Writer Abi Daré wasn’t planning to deal with a new novel, and a normalized practice among middle-class families in Nigeria, when her 8-year-old wouldn’t unload the dishwasher. But inspiration strikes where it will. She says, “When I was writing it, I did not think it would get published. So I was really telling myself a story.” – The New York Times

Though we’re not sure why they would, considering the book’s sales, Slate takes a gander at what publishers are saying about #ownvoices books. Or, well, they’re not; they mostly seem to think the book was simply positioned for the wrong market. “‘You can’t be Twitter woke and Walmart ambitious,’ the assistant editor quipped.” Wow, OK. That certainly says something about what publishers are thinking. – Slate

The authors welcomed a drop in the proportion of white executives from 86% in 2015 to 78%, “since true change in company culture almost always requires buy-in from the very top”. But the numbers of white people in editorial roles increased from 82% to 85%, “so, even though more diverse books are being published now, it’s fair to assume that the majority of them are still being acquired and edited by white people”. – The Guardian