Category: words

Few of the newspaper obituarists seemed to know quite what he had done. He had been involved in something that had changed the way texts are interpreted; but it was not really clear why that was so Earth-shattering. – Times Literary Supplement

“There’s a tendency among some Anglophones to see the official struggle to resist English as somewhat hysterical. That attitude partly reflects the smugness of a people who increasingly expect to see their language everywhere they go—and who are accustomed to English’s ability to shamelessly gobble up terms from other tongues. If you see France’s efforts as a celebration of linguistic biodiversity, however, then the ingenuity employed in French’s defense make more sense.” – CityLab

War and Peace? Bring it! Every single word of Silas Marner? Amateurs! What about 72 hours of Sherlock Holmes? Bliss! “‘There is an appetite for the epic that has simply surpassed our expectations,’ says Celia De Wolff, who has produced and directed a marathon adaptation of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, to be broadcast over three days” in Britain. “Event radio like this gives the audience a sense of achievement.” – The Observer (UK)

Olivia Laing won a £10,000 prize for her novel Crudo over the weekend. But Laing said, in her acceptance speech, “Crudo was written against a kind of selfishness that’s everywhere in the world right now, against an era of walls and borders, winners and losers. Art doesn’t thrive like that and I don’t think people do either. We thrive on community, solidarity and mutual support and as such, and assuming this is agreeable to my fellow authors, I’d like the prize money to be split between us, to nourish as much new work as possible.” – The Guardian (UK)

Sure, some of this is funny – “One edition of Animal Farm: A Fairy Story referred to itself on the back cover as Animals Farm: A Fair Story. The preface referred to another great Orwell work, Homage to Catalonia, as Homepage to Catalonia – but overall, not so great (or funny). “Until recently, improving Orwell was not a practical business proposition. Then Amazon blew the doors off the heavily curated literary world.” – The New York Times

Martin, famously far, far behind on his books in The Song of Ice and Fire series (which became The Game of Thrones on HBO), says, “Having the show finish is freeing, because I’m at my own pace now. I have good days and I have bad days and the stress is far less, although it’s still there… I’m sure that when I finish A Dream of Spring you’ll have to tether me to the Earth.” – The Observer (UK)

India is a huge country with many different regional cuisines. But cookbooks haven’t reflected that – until now. “As the publishing industry’s view of Indian cuisine approaches homogenization … recent years have seen a quiet renaissance of cookbooks focused on particular communities and geographies of India. Some are published privately by earnest ladies’ community groups and some are printed by small presses, while a few are helmed by big publishing houses. And it is through these essential books that we consume our country.” – LitHub

Dorothy West was called Zora Neale Hurston’s “Kid Sister,” and her books were not immediate successes, partly, some say, because she wrote about the Black middle class. “She wrote ‘posh black’ at a time when ‘broke black’ was in vogue, and this sits at the heart of her flickering obscurity, a myopia in mainstream culture that struggled to perceive blackness as anything more than one-dimensional.” – The Guardian (UK)