Category: words

“In a peer-reviewed paper published in the journal Romance Studies, Gerard Cheshire, a research associate at the University of Bristol, argues the manuscript is … a type of therapeutic reference book composed by nuns for Maria of Castile, queen of Aragon, in a lost language known as proto-Romance.” – The Guardian

“In Latin America, it’s said that Chile produces poets, Argentina produces short story writers, Mexico produces novelists, and Uruguay produces ‘los raros‘ — the strange ones.” And, writes his translator, Annie McDermott, “[Mario] Levrero was a raro of the highest order.” – Literary Hub

A new biography by Benjamin Moser argues, citing previously unreleased correspondence as well as textual analysis, that Philip Rieff’s Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, which launched his academic career, was actually written (or rewritten) by Sontag, who had married Rieff when she was 17 — and that she relinquished rights to the book as part of her divorce settlement in order to avoid a custody fight over her son. – The Guardian

The Indian Novels Collective was founded two years ago by four Mumbai professionals who realized that their growing children were reading Indian books written only in English — and missing out on a huge, high-quality body of work written in India’s dozen-plus regional literary languages. The INC expects to start publishing in 2020 under the Speaking Tiger imprint, and publishers in the rest of the English-speaking world are showing some interest. – Book Riot

“Instead of holding up a few isolated women as exceptions to the rule of male genius, we owe it to that audience to raise up a crowd: sharing, teaching, citing, and celebrating them despite their flaws and complications. Only then can we demonstrate that literary history has always contained a cacophony of female voices, diverse in their politics and outlooks, but forthright in their determination to speak in public and be heard.” – LitHub

Dude seems to have developed from a pejorative epithet for a man about as far as possible from Jeff Bridges’s character as one could get. Grotesque came from a hole in the ground in Rome. Picturesque originally referred to actual pictures — specifically, a particular style of painting. Silhouette started as Louis XV’s treasury secretary, became a snippy insult, and only then came to refer to framed side-views of a person, cut from black paper. – BBC

“So, as we lurch into the future … what is literature’s place? What counts as literature? Who decides? Obviously, there is no single, edifying answer to these questions. So, if you will forgive me, I’m going to talk about my own experience of being a writer during these times — of grappling with the question of how to be a writer during these times, in particular in a country like India, a country that lives in several centuries simultaneously.” – The Guardian

And for the 1000th issue, the comic book team had to assemble its own creative superheroes. “While most comic books are created by one writer and one art team, Issue No. 1000 will have 80 — one team for each of its 80 pages.” – The New York Times

Yes, Stanford, we’re talking about you, but not only you. Even a libertarian agrees: “What is the point of a university press? Its main task, quite simply, is to publish works that expand our knowledge. Such books do not necessarily attract a large readership.” – The Atlantic

And then, the radical (as in, going to the root kind of radical) act of figuring out what’s OK to write about – and what’s a step too far. “To present ourselves as flawed is one thing, but to write about our children’s flaws? Or our grandchildren’s? That seems a betrayal. I had to scrap a whole essay on anger because to talk about the anger I’ve felt toward my son’s sons was too complicated.” – LitHub