Category: words

The Novel Is Dying? Please, Get Over It!

“I do not agree that the novel is doomed to become a marginal cultural force – but I can see why writers whose first successes came in the pre-digital age may think so. Gone are the days of the great advances and the pages and pages of serious, in-depth analysis the print media once used to offer to the novel and to the book-by-book progression of a novelist’s body of work.” – New Statesman

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s ‘Between The World And Me’ Is Now A Play, And It’s About To Tour The U.S

One of the first things that Kamilah Forbes did when she became executive producer at the Apollo Theater in Harlem was contact Coates, an old friend from college, and ask to adapt his award-winning memoir. “Book reading can be so solitary; we read our books by ourselves, and unless you’re part of a book club, do you really engage within the topics or in the actual writing or primarily the topic that the book discusses?” Forbes said. “The question was about how can we use theatre as this collective form of communication to have the broader conversation with the book.” – American Theatre

Why Should Anyone Be Upset That The Booker Prize Chose Two Winners?

“If the judges felt that they needed the world to know about these two novels, shouldn’t that be a cause for celebration? It seems to me that the work of these two fine writers is being overlooked as commentators express their disappointment that there wasn’t a knock-out in the final round. Do we really long for a champion that much?” – Irish Times

How Condé Nast (Who Was A Real Person) Invented The Glossy Magazine

“The equation of upscale readers and upscale brands with profit, projecting an aspirational image of the ideal consumer through both editorial and ads so that vulnerable readers would chase it, made Nast’s fortune many times over. His company established the template of the editor as a heroic, godlike figure casting down commandments from a print Mount Olympus, a status that continued after Nast’s death through the twentieth century.” Then, of course, came the internet and social media. – The New Republic

Reading As An Active Sport (No Really)

“The main contention of What We Talk About When We Talk About Books – that reading print can be a sociable, active, and even seditious activity – is so sensible that it seems incredible that this long-form, evidence-based case hasn’t been made before. Why does it matter? Perhaps not only because we should think about whether our fantasies about the printed word are true, but also because we should ask why these particular fantasies have become so dominant.” – Times Literary Supplement

Freelance Journalists In California Freak Out That New Uber Law Would Apply To Them

If a freelance journalist writes for a magazine, newspaper or other entity whose central mission is to disseminate the news, the law says, that journalist is capped at writing 35 “submissions” per year per “putative employer.” At a time when paid freelance stories can be written for a low end of $25 and high end of $1 per word, some meet that cap in a month just to make end’s meet. – The Hollywood Reporter

Viet Thanh Nguyen Talks About Writing, Social Movements, And The American Dream

Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer, says that he decided not to worry about what the audience thought, or more specifically thought of Asian Americans. “I had to stop caring. Because even as conditions of narrative scarcity were true, which they are, I don’t think a writer can allow herself or himself to be shaped by those conditions. … For example, the anxiety that because there are so few stories about us, we have to write our stories to make our own community look good, whatever that community is.” – The Millions