Category: words

The author got a seven-figure advance, the first print run is half a million copies, the book jacket features gushing blurbs by famous writers, and the book got loads of coverage in The New York Times. But then the Twitterverse came after it, observers called out plot points that strain credibility, and even Cummins herself said, “I don’t know if I’m the right person to tell this story.” And then Oprah got involved. – Vox

Some three-and-a-half weeks after Mehta’s death, the publishing house Alfred A. Knopf has appointed Reagan Arthur, currently senior vice president and publisher at Little, Brown, to succeed him as president and editor in chief. While few people knew this before the announcement, Arthur was Mehta’s own choice for the job. – Los Angeles Times

Once upon a time, none of these stories had yet been fixed on a page (or a clay tablet), but were carried in the physical bodies of the people who committed them to memory. Long before Johannes Gutenberg and his printing press, and 1,000 years before cloistered monks and their illuminated manuscripts, the principal storage facility for history, poetry, and folktales was the human head. And the chief means of transmitting that cultural wealth, from generation to generation, was the human voice. – LitHub

On the surface, yes, of course they were — and there are some modern-day emoji that look surprisingly like their Pharaonic predecessors. The differences, though, are deep. – The New York Times

Philippa Chong asked them. “Critics were understandably ambivalent towards amateur reviewers despite their appreciation for general readers’ enthusiasm about books. … If the critics I interviewed were concerned that amateurs did not bring enough analysis to their reading or lacked credentials to speak to a book’s artistic merit, they had equal concern … that literary scholars couldn’t always ‘code-switch’ to make their specialist form of criticism accessible to general readers looking for a straightforward review.” – Literary Hub

Should Jeanine Cummins have written the book? Lauren Groff doesn’t know. Should she have reviewed it? She doesn’t know! “Perhaps this book is an act of cultural imperialism; at the same time, weeks after finishing it, the novel remains alive in me,” she writes. – The New Republic

We seem to project enormously intense feelings onto books, feelings that make us protective of them and furious toward those we perceive as threatening them. We think of our books as symbols of our taste, our intellect, our moral vigor. And when we hold books in such high esteem, those who treat them as objects rather than as symbols become infidels. – Vox

Arthur Brand has recovered one of the oldest surviving copies of the Divan of Hafez, one of the most important and beloved works in all of Persian literature. The volume was the only still-missing item from a collection of manuscripts stolen in 2007 from the estate of a collector in Munich; the rest had been found, along with their thief, in 2011. – artnet

Students of Asian American literature have often been far more familiar with what is wrong with Aiiieeeee! than with Aiiieeeee! itself. From the earliest days of its publication, many Asian Americans did not hear themselves in the scream of Aiiieeeee!, did not see themselves in the “our” of its “fifty years of our whole voice.” They chafed against what they saw as the editorial limiting of “authentic” Asian Americanness to “Filipino, Chinese, and Japanese Americans, American born and raised.” This act of border drawing, by excluding Pacific Islander, Korean, and South Asian Americans (among others), further contributed to critics’ rejection of Aiiieeeee!’s brand of Asian American cultural nationalism as more divisive than unifying. – Paris Review

“Dutch design company Jora Vision will use Pushkin’s works as inspiration for the 17,000-square-meter Lukomorye park, named after the mythical Slavic land in which Pushkin’s fairy tales take place. … The amusement park will consist of three zones — a palace, a city and a harbor — each based on imaginary places in Pushkin’s stories. The park will also feature a swan lake, a fairytale forest and a ‘yarmarka,’ or Russian fair market. ” – The Moscow Times