Category: words

The foot traffic to Shakespeare and Company has only increased since nearby Notre Dame closed for fire repairs. But the bookstore is a monument in and of itself. “Through the narrow aisles and hairpin turns, we hear ‘ah’ and ‘oh’ as in the Louvre before the Mona Lisa. The only difference from the work of Leonardo da Vinci: No forest of selfie poles in front of the shelves because, here, we are not supposed to take pictures inside.” – Le Monde

The founder of Libreria Ghana opened with 1300 volumes in 2018, but she soon learned that having a cozy library wasn’t enough for her, or for her country. She doesn’t want to be seen as a hero. “To deny the feeling of pleasure and, indeed, self-satisfaction that comes from knowing you’ve made a difference to an individual, a community and, by extension, a society, would be to deny being human. After all, the payoff of self-sacrifice is often self-fulfillment. There are no saviors, not even Black ones.” – LitHub

Mystery novelists have to write a lot of deaths. Which is their fave? Depends on the author, of course Ruth Ware: “Set on a cruise ship, it’s one of the most coldblooded crimes I’ve ever devised — a murder committed in international waters using a method designed to leave detectives wondering not just whodunit but did it happen at all? It’s a plan predicated on a single driving force: a desire to kill, and get away without even a stain of suspicion.” – The New York Times

Yuval Noah Harari: “As a thinker and author, I do my best to reach diverse audiences around the world, and not just readers in Western democracies. … Some will no doubt disagree, but I think that as long as local adaptations of books are done in the form of altering specific examples rather than core ideas, they are worth the price.” – Newsweek

Sixty-seven years is a good run for anything, but, when Mad confirmed that it was joining National Lampoon and Life and Spy in the magazine graveyard, and the Elysian Fields of online archives, the pang that many felt, as if leaving a childhood bedroom for the last time, was that its departure was nonetheless abrupt and premature. – The New Yorker

“While prejudice and disadvantage persist in ‘the real world,’ in the literary world we BAME writers (that’s Black and Minority Ethnic folk) are insulated by liberals falling over themselves to provide us with feather beds and glittering prizes. From this position of privilege I experienced a prolonged and profound sense of shame and failure because after the success of my debut novel, Brick Lane, each subsequent book was largely met with scorn or bemusement by reviewers.” – LitHub

“Many of the more than three dozen former employees who spoke to HuffPost said they entered the company hungry and hopeful, only to feel twisted around by a publicly woke company that privately left them feeling exhausted, distrustful of leadership and desperate for financial security.” – HuffPost

“Christian Book Distributors, also known as CBD, was started four decades ago by brothers Ray and Stephen Hendrickson, selling Christian books, Bibles, home-schooling materials, toys and games. But the company has announced that the rising popularity of cannabidiol, the legal cannabis-derived chemical known as CBD, has begun to cause some unfortunate customer errors.” – The Guardian

Qurratulain Hyder’s River of Fire, written in Urdu and translated by the author into English in 1998, “tells a completist and syncretistic version of 2,500 years of history in modern-day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh — beginning with the Nanda Dynasty on the brink of defeat by the founder of the Mauryan Empire (323 to 185 BCE), and ending in post-Partition despair. But the novel, barreling through the ages, leads up to 1947 with great purpose, the deep past used to understand the suddenness and chaos of Partition.” – The Nation

“I built this model to investigate whether nonprofits are, as they claim, more literary than conglomerates. The results allow me to extend recent computational studies into literariness and answer yes.” – Public Books