O’Brien’s new novel Girl is her 19th, and it’s different from the rest. The veteran writer is now 88, and she says it may be her last. Her first three novels, in the 1960s, “articulated what, until then, had remained relatively unspoken in staunchly Catholic Ireland: female sexual desire, active and acted upon.” – The Observer (UK)
Category: words
Is The Political Novel Dead?
Sure, there are many political writers, and of course all writing is political in some way. “Much harder to find, however, is an example of what one might call the campaigning novel: that subset that includes classics by the likes of Charles Dickens and Émile Zola alongside fiction-cloaked manifestos, memoirs and works of reportage. What unites them is a passionate desire to use character and narrative to draw the reader’s attention to some social ill and to galvanise efforts to remedy it.” – The Guardian (UK)
Kicking The Sophomore Curse To The Curb, By Taking Eight Years To Publish A Second Novel
Téa Obreht took her time after The Tiger’s Wife struck the bestseller list and stayed for many, many months. She says, “It was appropriate to let the wrong books go and wait for the right one to come along.” – The New York Times
What Is The Legal Difference Between An ‘Audiobook Caption’ And, Well, A Book?
Audible – the Amazon-owned audiobook giant – is being sued by the big 5 publishers. Why? A new feature that automatically generates “captions” for its audiobooks. Captions that … well, one might be forgiven for thinking we already have “captions” for books, which are books. The argument: “Audible didn’t seek a license, doesn’t plan to compensate publishers and won’t allow them to decide which titles are made available as so-called distributed text. [The lawyer] also says Audible’s Immersion Reading feature, which requires a user to purchase both the audiobook and eBook, meets the goal of Captions without infringing publishers’ rights.” – Wired
Russian Literature And The Meaning Of Truth
“We usually assume that literature exists to depict life, but Russians often speak as if life exists to provide material for literature. Russians, of course, excel in ballet, chess, theater, and mathematics. They invented the periodic table and non-Euclidian geometry. Nevertheless, for Russians literature is in a class by itself. The very phrase “Russian literature” carries a sacramental aura.” – New Criterion
Comfort Reading: In Defense Of Returning To The Same Book Over And Over
Rebecca Jennings — who confesses to having read each of the Harry Potter books at least ten times and insists she’s “not advocating for laziness” — points to research on “repeated hedonic experiences” that explains why those repeated experiences are hedonic (that means pleasurable) and, in fact, good for you. – Vox
Fascinating To Contemplate What We Define As “World Literature” (We Read So Little Of It)
“World literature happens when Russian novels remake English literature; when a Turkish writer takes inspiration from a Colombian writer; when Japanese critics review translations of Lebanese poetry. It almost always involves re-interpretation and misunderstanding: a Spanish monk sent to suppress Aztec literature ended up disseminating it instead; subsequently, Aztec hymns envision a Christian God urging revolt against the Spaniards. World literature is also nothing new under the sun.” – Harvard Magazine
Near-Total Sweep For Women At The Hugo Awards
Okay, they didn’t win every single prize there was at the annual honors for science fiction (men won for the best film and television scripts, for instance), but female creators took home the awards for best novel, novella, novelette, short story, graphic story, fan fiction, fanzine, fancast, and fan art. Not bad for a genre that was considered more or less closed to most women not so long ago. – The Verge
Just What Qualifies As A “Millennial Novel”?
“As any digital marketeer with their crosshairs on millennials will tell you, the way we “consume” culture has fragmented. Put in less depressing terms, we have a greater range of representative voices to choose from than in Brett Easton Ellis’s decadent brat-pack days. The aim of publishing now should be to widen that range further.” – The Guardian
Noam Chomsky Talks Language (And Not Politics)
At age 90, the MIT professor has been an éminence grise of the American left for so long that it’s easy to forget that he is, above all, an academic linguist who has made major (if controversial) contributions to his field. Amy Brand, director of the MIT Press (and a former student of Chomsky’s as well as editor of his books), talks with him about language versus birdsong, linguistics and machine learning, and his most famous (and most misunderstood) sentence: “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” – The MIT Press Reader