Category: words

Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Norwegian, and Dutch, along with English, assign Greek this particular honor. In the Baltic languages, it’s Spanish; the Bulgarians use “Patagonian.” And the Greeks? They, along with more nations than any other, use Chinese to signify the incomprehensible. Dan Nosowitz looks into the origins of the expression. – Atlas Obscura

Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains, which recounts his escape from Iran to Indonesia and onward to Australia by boat, has just won the $25,000 National Biography Award, the fourth prize it has received in a year. Boochani composed the book text message by text message, which he sent from the detention center on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. – The Guardian

“I got kind of tired seeing classics just for scholarly use or school use,” says the inveterate reader who became frustrated, she says, with clunky, boring or dated designs of books, which were not intended to appeal to new readers. “It’s not many publishers that have set up a classics backlist like this. It’s usually the big multinationals … they can print huge quantities of these books and warehouse them across the world. I’m just starting small.” – Toronto Star

“We no longer accept that writing must be lifeless, that it can only convey our tone of voice roughly and imprecisely, or that nuanced writing is the exclusive domain of professionals. We’re creating new rules for typographical tone of voice. Not the kind of rules that are imposed from on high, but the kind of rules that emerge from the collective practice of a couple billion social monkeys — rules that enliven our social interactions.” – The Atlantic

In an effort to keep his father’s books in front of a new generation of readers, the younger Mr. Salinger is beginning to ease up, gradually lifting a cloud of secrecy that has obscured the life and work of one of America’s most influential and enigmatic writers. – The New York Times

Ross Douthat: “Her passing raises the question: Is she the last of the species? The last American novelist who made novels seem essential to an educated person’s understanding of her country?” – The New York Times

In New York City and Los Angeles, the country’s two capitals for audiobook work, narrators annually earn around $40,000 on average, according to Voices.com. A large publisher might pay as much as $350 per hour, but smaller publishers might pay $50 or less per hour, with the rate tied to how long they say it should take to read a certain number of pages. To make a decent return on your labor, you have to be good. – Washington Post

Are we ready to argue that translation is not merely an interpretative task, but also an artistic one, and that translators are artists? As tempting as this upgrade in status seems, I would argue for something else. – Public Books

As Amazon Studios does with movies, Amazon Publishing feeds the content pipelines created by the tech giant’s online storefront and Amazon Prime membership program. At its most extreme, Amazon Publishing is a triumph of vertical engineering: If a reader buys one of its titles on a Kindle, Amazon receives a cut both as publisher and as bookseller—not to mention whatever markup it made on the device in the first place, as well as the amortized value of having created more content to draw people into its various book-subscription offerings. – The Atlantic