Category: words

“We’re going through a particularly rich time for American essays: especially compared to, 20 years ago, when editors wouldn’t even dare put the word “essays” on the cover, but kept trying to package these variegated assortments as single-theme discourses, we’ve seen many collections that have been commercially successful and attracted considerable critical attention.” – LitHub

The powerhouse publisher was put up for sale by its owner, ViacomCBS, in March, and the company has since fielded more than half a dozen inquiries, according to three people familiar with the process who declined to be named because the matter remains confidential. – The New York Times

“Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown, a satirical, cinematic novel written in the form of a screenplay, has won the National Book Award for fiction. Tamara Payne and her father the late Les Payne’s Malcolm X biography, The Dead Are Arising, was cited for nonfiction and Kacen Callender’s King and the Dragonflies for young people’s literature. The poetry prize went to Don Mee Choi’s DMZ Colony and the winner for best translated work was Yu Miri’s Tokyo Ueno Station, translated from Japanese by Morgan Giles.” – AP

Linguists today aim to apply methods from other sciences to messy social phenomena. But the influence once ran the other way, with discoveries in linguistic history leaving a mark on evolutionary theory. – The Economist

“Around 90% of [William Gaddis’s] JR is in unattributed dialogue, with only dashes and ellipses to indicate when a character starts and stops speaking or, more accurately, is interrupted. [The novel] is a teeming operatic racket, an anarchic satire of US capitalism where the flailing voices of more than 120 characters – plus snatches of adverts, news bulletins and TV broadcasts – bellow over one other.” Actor Nick Sullivan’s 37-hour reading of JR has attracted a fanbase in the nine years since it was released, and he calls it “the most rewarding narration job I have ever had.” – The Guardian

“[Garth Greenwell] is, a practitioner, with [Lidia] Yuknavitch and a few others, of what we might call the School of Embodiment: a kind of close tracking of sensation and response that we typically assign to poets or sensory neurologists. This doesn’t mean that work by these writers is stylistically similar, only that it seeks meaning in and through the body.” – The Point

In three years, Substack’s newsletters—covering almost every conceivable topic, from Australian Aboriginal rights to bread recipes to local Tennessee politics—have drawn more than two hundred fifty thousand paid subscribers. The top newsletter authors can earn six figures, an unheard-of amount for freelance journalists. – Columbia Journalism Review

Johanna Anderson said the situation had become so financially serious for university libraries that it was time for MPs and competition authorities to hold publishers to account. She cited the example of an economics book that costs £44 for a print copy but is £423 for a single e-book user and £500 for three users. An employment law book costs £50 for a hard copy, but is £1,600 for three users of the digital version. – BBC

At the beginning of the lockdown more than two weeks ago, the Paris mayor, Anne Hidalgo, pleaded – unsuccessfully – for bookshops to be allowed to remain open and asked the public not to use Amazon. The call has been echoed by the former president François Hollande. – The Guardian

Late last month, the Royal Spanish Academy launched the Observatory of Words, a web portal that discusses terms and expressions which are coming into regular use in Spanish but which the Academy isn’t ready to officially include in dictionaries. The media quickly noticed that among the words indexed in the new Observatory was elle, coined as a gender-neutral alternative to el/ella (he/she). Within four days, elle was gone. Here’s why. – Global Voices