Category: words

“Over the past year, the magazine has been locked in a bizarre intra-company battle between writers and photographers with a web of companies and individuals all seemingly blaming each other for the missed payments.” – The Daily Beast

“[The handover] will end a decade-long struggle to retrieve the missing Brod papers which, according to Israel’s National Library, were stolen 10 years ago in Tel Aviv. The documents, letters and memoirs re-emerged in 2013, when two Israelis approached the German Literary Archives in Marbach, and private collectors, with a huge collection of unpublished documents belonging to Brod.” – Yahoo! (AFP)

Ferrante: “I chose to write out of a fear of handling more concrete and dangerous forms of power. And also perhaps out of a strong feeling of alienation from the techniques of domination, so that at times writing seemed to be the most congenial way for me to react to abuses of power.” – The New York Times

For a podcast – transcribed here – writers Daniel José Older and Marlon James (Booker prizewinner for 2015) talk with creative writing profs about what genre even is, and why it’s better not to be a snob. Older: “They put up the series of two albums, that were Duke Ellington albums, and one of them was called Piano in the Forefront. And one of them was called Piano in the Background, right? And that’s how I think about some of these terms. It’s like, if the plot is foregrounded, if most of the time that we see them, they’re on their mission, and they’re trying to solve the crime or get the bad guy or do what they have to do, that’s going to feel, rhythmically, like a genre novel.” – LitHub

Or, if not to blame, then to illuminate how we understand our moon. “If technologies once found only in SF do sometimes become real they do not, in so doing, always cease to be science fictional. SF is not, after all, simply a literature about the future; it is a literature about the shock of new capacities and new perspectives, about transcendence, estrangement and resistance in the face of the inhuman. Its ideas shape and constrain the ways in which technological possibilities are seen, understood and experienced long after those possibilities are first tentatively realised.” – The Guardian (UK)

Why? Because of some not so great romance novel tropes. Novelist Liz Lincoln: “We need to start putting abortion in our books. … As an alternative to marrying virtual strangers after a surprise pregnancy. As a part of character backstory. As a thing lots of people experience. … It needs to be as regular in books as characters with dead parents or green eyes. As a normal part of life, not as a moral lesson where women are then punished for their choice.” – The Guardian (UK)

Longtime editor Gary Fisketjon, founder of Vintage Contemporary and a vice-president at the company, was asked to leave after a suspension and an investigation because of “a breach of company policy,” the company said. – The New York Times

“Before the nineteen-sixties, the books Presidential candidates wrote weren’t usually memoirs; they were collections of speeches.” Now? “Sometimes Presidential candidates write books about their vision for the country; sometimes they write books about themselves. And then, sometimes, their vision for America is a vision of themselves.” – The New Yorker

Founded in 1995 as one of the first internet-only general-interest newsmagazines, Salon has been losing money for its entire history, and the company warned that it may have to be liquidated if this sale is not completed. (The purchasers, according to a subsequent report, are a pair of tech entrepreneurs.) – New York Post