Category: words

You know you’re just sort of renting those ebooks you supposedly bought, right? Well, let the demise of Microsoft ebooks explain it all to you. “The digital bookstore never took off. As of April 2, it halted all ebook sales. And starting as soon as this week, it’s going to remove all purchased books from the libraries of those who bought them.” Sorry, what? Yes. If you bought Microsoft ebooks, they’re soon to be gone. – Wired

Possibly. “Krantz was the ‘queen of the bonkbuster,’ those glitzy novels with their gaudy covers and snappy often one-word titles – Scruples, Lace, Rivals – that dominated commercial fiction in the late 1970s and 1980s, spinning stories of fabulous lives lived at full tilt and stuffed full of sex, secrets and shopping.” But they were so much more than that: “They are also part of a rich tradition of novels which place women’s interior lives and, most importantly, their sexual desires centre-stage.” – The Observer (UK)

Obviously, perhaps, they used to be more common in poetry than they are now – think Wordsworth, Dickenson, and so many more. Now, “exclamation marks are not exactly rare in contemporary poetry—but they are occasional enough for us to take notice. For all their ubiquity in texts and emails, exclamation marks call attention toward themselves in poems: they stand straight up.” – The Millions

When the poet laureate of Scotland meets the poet laureate of the United States … no, not the start of a joke. “Both strongly believe in poetry as a means of fostering empathy by inhabiting different characters and different selves. ‘In a way I think of your work as a great opera of voices,’ [Jackie] Kay tells [Tracy K.] Smith. ‘It’s almost like you’re saying that all of these human beings come through us, that we’re not one person, we’re many.'” – The Observer (UK)

Maybe because it’s easier on certain types of reviewers and critics to ignore clear evidence of suffering and pain? “Oliver and Bishop share a clear appetite for animal flail and gore and death. But many readers don’t seem to make very much of this. Critics praise the work, but tend to smile gently, indulgently, upon Bishop’s rhymes, her received forms and elegant impersonality, Oliver’s ‘old-fashioned’ subjects.” – LitHub

Language can be curved, bent, cajoled, broken, reconstituted, made to fit a creators passion. When that’s what you want to read, here are some ideas to put up higher on the TBR pile. – The Rumpus

Guy Gunaratne, whose novel is written in ”a pungent first-person patois,” explains that of course he speaks differently to an interviewer. “publishing is pretty middle class and I’ve had to accommodate. In London, you learn to code-switch quite well and I’ve always thought of that as a superpower in a way. You’re able to express yourself with different vocabulary in different situations, not through any pretence but because the way you express yourself matters, and your social condition is inherited through your inheritance of dialect.” – The Guardian (UK)

As Emily Temple notes in LitHub, that 2010 cover was also the first in about 10 years – and as she also says, “Maybe in 2029 it will be a woman! (Just kidding, there definitely won’t be magazines by then.)” Not to take away from Whitehead, of course; as the profile says, “If greatness is excellence sustained over time, then without question, Whitehead is one of the greatest of his generation. In fact, figuring his age, acclaim, productivity and consistency, he is one of the greatest American writers alive.” – TIME Magazine

The story is about 50 memoirs from the last 50 years, but The New York Times has also ranked them. Want to know what number one is? (You know BuzzFeed would make this a quiz, asking how many you’ve read, but now you can do that on your own.) – The New York Times