Category: words

Nancy Bass Wyden: “My dad’s proudest moment came in 1996, when he finally saved up enough money to buy the building that had housed the store since he was a young man. He’d watched rents climb and he’d seen enough competitors go under to know that making that purchase was key to ensuring the Strand’s survival. This week, that security vanished. By designating the store a landmark, the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission put the Strand in peril.” – New York Daily News

“The personal touch sometimes takes some of the critical edge out of books conversation online. Like many outlets, Bustle is fazing out professional book reviews, and Electric Literature did away with its reviews a couple of years ago now. Instead, these websites are prioritizing personal essays from a diverse group of writers, and both of the aforementioned sites have a women-focused editorial strategy.” – Publishers Weekly

“It tells us that wars are hell, but we knew that already. It tells us that most human beings are not so bad, except for the ones who are, and that’s valuable information. It doesn’t tell us how to get to the planet Tralfamadore, but it does tell us how to communicate with its inhabitants. All we have to do is build something big, like the Pyramids or the Great Wall of China.”- The New Yorker

On the backs of pictures that photographer Hank O’Neal took of the marches in the 1970s, Ginsberg commented in Ginsbergian style. “Black white brown boy girl what idealism! — Wearing their hearts on a banner for nothing but love” – Hyperallergic

The decision came despite strong opposition from the owner of the Strand, Nancy Bass Wyden, who argued that the designation would mire the bookstore “in a lifetime of needless red tape.” – Publishers Weekly

In fact, writes Michael Dirda, the tale came from one Antoine Galland, an early-18th-century Orientalist who was the first Westerner to translate the actual Thousand and One Nights from the Arabic. He was working from a manuscript that had only 35 stories in it — and, when his translations became hits, he (not unlike Sheherazad herself) had to come up with more material to meet reader demand. – The Washington Post

Emily Ruskovich’s Idaho has won the €100,000 International Dublin Literary Award, for which books are nominated by libraries around the world. She said that when she first got news of the prize, she thought she was hallucinating. – The Guardian

“No one living, of course, knows exactly what it sounded like, so scholars make their best educated guesses using internal evidence in the scant literature, secondary sources in other languages from the time, and similarities to other, living languages.” And here are some of those educated guesses, applied to excerpts from Beowulf, prayers, and even a casual conversation. – Open Culture

“Prison language, or language created by inmates while incarcerated, has a long and vivid history, and is likely as old as the modern prison itself.” Says linguist Julie Colman, “It’s quite a fertile place for a language to develop. You’ve got a literally captive audience and a very dense social network.” – Canvas