Category: words

Tobias S. Buckell: “Nora K. Jemisin  was just saying on Twitter the other day that in science fiction we have this venerable tradition of using metaphor to dig at some of these problems—like race and power and structure and history—and that it’s been a mistake, because in the past we would always use the metaphor assuming that our fellow readers and fans of the genre were following along, getting the metaphor, and it turns out that they weren’t. In other words, you needed to be way more in-your-face.” – Wired

Le Monde isn’t mincing words here. While the U.S., at least one novelist claims, has a blockbuster mentality, France is much more welcoming, a place where “several of these authors, who no longer have a publisher in the United States, see their talent justly distinguished.” – Le Monde (France)

There are a lot – a lot – of new cancer memoirs out right now. “As these memoirs suggest, individually and together, there’s no way to eliminate the risk of cancer and or be spared from grief. In addition, they call into question the popular notions that grief proceeds in simple, sequential stages.” – LitHub

Said the organizers of the Republic of Consciousness Prize, devoted to books from publishers with five or fewer employees, “While the competitive dynamic of prizes points readers towards ‘the best books’, they also create a false hierarchy where ‘the best’ becomes a valid category.” So, beginning with this year, judges may select anywhere from one to four titles as winners, “on the criteria that book X or Y cannot not win.'” – The Guardian

Ever since Keith Urbahn and Matt Latimer persuaded James Comey to write what became A Higher Loyalty, edited the manuscript, and worked a skillful media campaign around it, their agency, Javelin, “[has] become a popular destination for Trump administration officials, especially those contemplating an exit — ‘and they all are, by the way,’ Urbahn [said]. … Their central insight is that that hoary old fixture of Washington self-promotion, the tell-all, may be the ideal solution to the very new problem of post-Trump rehabilitation.” – The New York Times Magazine

University of Michigan researchers found that “reading print books together generated more verbalizations about the story from parents and from toddlers, more back and forth ‘dialogic’ collaboration. (‘What’s happening here?’ ‘Remember when you went to the beach with Dad?’)” – The New York Times

Perhaps not since the advent of the internet itself has a single technology buzzword captured the imagination of so many. Book publishing is no exception: a growing number of startup companies, people in existing companies, and investors are touting the promise of blockchain technology for publishing. Meanwhile, skeptics say that blockchain cannot possibly live up to all the hype. – Publishers Weekly

More than 6,000 staffers at Waterstones have signed a petition for the chain’s in-store staff to be paid a starting wage of £9 per hour (£10.55 in metro London), and 1,340 authors have signed a petition in support. Though the chain returned to profitability two years ago, its managing director says it can’t pay that much: “There’s a long gap between wanting to do something and it being remotely sensible.” – The Guardian

 It must be that people don’t remember real parties well enough to re-create them with any accuracy. There’s too much missing information. Fictive parties evoke this sense of impaired time by impairing the narrative, with non sequitur, snippets of nonsense conversation, and continuity errors. It’s often suddenly 2 AM. Whole hours may go by in the space of a sentence, as in A Handful of Dust: “They drank a lot.” Those four words are one paragraph, and contain so much. – Paris Review