Category: words

“Over a career spanning 50 years, [Juan Carlos] Onetti depicted Uruguay in short stories and novels as a place marked by pettiness, idiocy and squalor — a Gogolian province in the tropics [sic] — and populated by characters who are by and large unhinged. However unflattering, his portrait of his country was one in which Uruguayans recognized something of themselves.” – The New York Times Book Review

“Conlangs” (constructed languages) are hardly new: Esperanto and Volapük were created in the 19th century; Tolkien claimed he wrote his Middle Earth books so that someone would speak the Elvish tongues he invented; Klingon was completed in the 1980s. But over the past 30 years, conlangs have exploded (aided greatly by the Internet connecting the nerds who do the constructing). Some of these languages are being used in neurolinguistic research, and one has been developed as a useful lingua franca for Slavs. – Slate

No doubt social media in particular seems to represent the triumph of the writerly type over the writing itself. But DeWitt, Baker, Whitehead, and Atwood are among our most accomplished writers; so what if they’re willing to play the type on occasion? It might seem possible to just perform the office of writer—thoughtfully curated Instagrams of to-read piles, tweets geo-tagged at the MacDowell Colony—but it’s still a publish-or-perish business. – The New Republic

Published in August, Mr. Dubois’s novel “Tous les hommes n’habitent pas le monde de la même façon” (“All Men Do Not Live in the Same Way”) is a story narrated by a man languishing in a Canadian prison for an unknown crime. – The New York Times

The central library is built to serve as a kind of citizenship factory, a space for old and new residents to learn about the world, the city, and each other. It’s pointedly sited across from (and at the same level as) the Finnish Parliament House that it shares a public square with. – CityLab

Autumn is “Oscar season for books” in France, and that’s not a super feeling for the authors. “For all the finger food that will be gobbled up and all the champagne flutes that will be downed in this chaotic two-month period—from mid-August to the end of October—that runs from the release of 524 books to the crowning of a happy few by a dozen major literary prizes mid-November, La Rentrée Littéraire is an exciting and brutal tradition that engages the whole country, and takes both a mental and physical toll on an increasingly anxious book industry.” – Literary Hub

Well, after the librarians remodeled the library and encouraged teachers at the Melbourne school to bring their entire classes – not just kids in detention – to the space, the school’s test scores shifted radically, and the school is seeing a massive increase in students wanting to study arts and music. – The Age (Australia)

Children aren’t reading for their brand, and they’ve got something adults often don’t: Time. Also, “children’s books are where we first encounter myriad aspects of life. Such intense periods of discovery tend to lodge in the memory.” – The Observer (UK)