“In 2016, small publishers like New Directions and Coffee House Press and lauded indie powerhouses like Melville House continue to bring many deserving international voices to the forefront. And in an election year that has many Americans wondering what in the bloody hell is going on around here, books from other parts of the globe can be a welcome treat to help counterbalance the chaos.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
‘Everyone Is Scared’ In Hong Kong’s Book Industry Since Those Publishers And Booksellers Were Disappeared
“Bookshops have closed. Publishers have left. Authors have stopped writing. Books have been pulped. Printers are refusing political works. Translators have grown weary of being associated with certain topics. Readers have stopped buying. And the whole industry is wondering if hard-hitting books on Chinese politics still have a future in the former British colony.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 12.27.16
12 Plays of Xmas: 1. Owners by Caryl Churchill
Caryl Churchill is the presiding playwright of our era. At 78, every play she writes is an event – not because of their rarity, or a forelock-tugging spirit of sentimentality, but because … read more
AJBlog: Performance Monkey Published 2016-12-27
Triple Gravy
Ray Brown wrote “Gravy Waltz,” with a lyric by comedian and talk show host Steve Allen. Allen recorded the piece on piano and got extensive airplay with it in … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2016-12-27
My forgotten uncle
If my family had any dark secrets, they went to the grave with my parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. But like all families, we did have a few subjects of which we preferred not to … read more
AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2016-12-27
Rising Tide
Patterns of rising and falling inflection are vital to a lot of music. Purely instrumental music often encodes emphasis-patterns that resemble speech, or song. (Linguists prefer the term “intonation” to signify these … read more
AJBlog: PianoMorphosis Published 2016-12-27
What Is The Speed Of Human Thought?
“Human thought takes time to form, and so the ‘right now’ that we’re experiencing inside our skulls is always a little later than what’s going on in the outside world. .l. So, in a sense, the future has already happened – we’re just not aware of it yet. To make things even more complicated, the different senses operate at different speeds.”
If You Could Sum Up 2016 With A Punctuation Mark, It Would Be This One
“Scare quotes (also known, even more colorfully, as ‘shudder quotes’ and ‘sneer quotes’) are identical to standard quotation marks, but do precisely the opposite of what quotation marks are supposed to do: They signal irony, and uncertainty. They suggest words that don’t quite mean what they claim to.”
‘Seinfeld’ Writers Reveal The Shocking Truth: They Did Not Make Festivus Up – It Was Real
Dan O’Keefe explains how his father invented it as a family holiday 50 years ago, and how it got into a Seinfeld script. (O’Keefe really, really hoped it would get cut.) The real-life Festivus didn’t have a set date or season or the Feats of Strength, but there was an aluminum pole and there was most definitely Airing of Grievances.
How Scentists On TV Went From Bruce Banner And The ‘Gilligan’s Island’ Professor To ‘CSI’ And Walter White
“Gone is the lone genius with a shed full of goofy contraptions and bubbling liquids. Today’s fictional researchers work in realistic labs, with high-tech equipment, and in teams with others. Their dialogue is scattered with words from the latest scientific literature, and they have so much depth and personality that they carry entire shows.”
Can We Now Officially Call Arvo Pärt A Great Composer?
David Patrick Stearns considers the strong and weak points in the music of the world’s most-performed living composer. (He also offers “the only theory I have on why hipsters will listen to Pärt meditating on the baptism of St. Augustine.”)
How An 18th-Century Presbyterian Minister Helped Create Modern Computer Science, Forensic Science, And Brain Science
In 1748 David Hume argued, inter alia, that the probability of witnesses inaccurately claiming to have witnessed the risen Jesus was greater than that of Jesus actually rising from the dead. For the Reverend Thomas Bayes, this was simply not acceptable.
The Antiques Business Is Shrinking, And Dealers Try To Adapt
Many of the well-known storefronts in New York and London have moved or closed, and some estimates say that the entire industry has shrunk by half. (Sotheby’s income in the category has shrunk by more than 80% since 2007.)