Category: words

The Spanish Royal Academy (RAE), the institution in charge of defending and defining the Spanish language, had been reeling under cuts for more than a decade. Then it got a new director – and he never stopped saying the RAE was of concern to the country. That worked, to the tune of 5 million Euros. Now, “the RAE will be in charge of at least 20 projects of exceptional interest, including the elaboration of different dictionaries, grammar or, now, its work of ensuring the correct use of language in the digital era.” – El País

And in specific, stop harassing Asian Americans authors. Listen to author R.O. Kwon (The Incendiaries) discuss her experiences at literary events: “Aside from the colorist comments about my skin, some of these words — adorable, cute, silky, shiny — could be taken, incorrectly, as compliments. I acknowledge that there’s luck, and privilege, in inhabiting a body that others might find appealing. But when I’m at these events, I am at work. I am talking about my profession, not about my hair or skin or any perceived cuteness.” – The New York Times

Writers focusing on the time period itself, and its long aftermath, have a lot of conflicting desires for their books. “What comes across in all of the writing on the Atlantic slave trade is the sustained tension between a determination to close the chapter on slavery and the desperate fear of forgetting.” – The Guardian (UK)

Mitchell Kaplan founded Books & Books in 1982, a time when Miami was seen as a place of drug running, diet culture, and political unrest – and certainly not literary culture. But, well, “thirty-seven years, an international book fair and eight additional locations later, Kaplan is celebrated as the man who turned Miami into a book town, and one of the foremost literary centers in the world.” – The New York Times

Charlotte Perkins Gilman has become a go-to feminist author with her clear, understandable, and terrifying short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” forgotten after her death but rediscovered in the 1970s. But she wrote a lot of nonfiction as well. In that writing, “she accused non-white immigrants of ‘diluting’ the racial purity of America and advocated for a government-run, slavery-adjacent system of forced labor, which she called ‘enlistment,’ for black Americans.” – LitHub

What’s the Whiting Award – and who are these people? (It’s a $50,000 award for early-career writers, so no surprise you don’t know most of them yet.) – NPR

And writing about trauma doesn’t bestow some kind of catharsis on authors, or so says T. Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls. “My love for magic, still, is all about mechanics. Construction. Physics. My knowledge of how tricks are done does not deaden the awe and admiration I feel—it deepens it. Sometimes I work hard for that knowledge.” – LitHub

“Chaucer was able to transform English poetry the way he did precisely because of his internationalism, not his nationalism. Like all educated men of his day, he was multilingual. He devoured late-antique philosophy, Latin translations of Arabic scientific treatises, and French love poems. His unusually good knowledge of Italian – and his travels to Italy – allowed him to access the latest poetry of Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch. Indeed, Chaucer’s very fascination with vernacularity was a European phenomenon: Dante and Boccaccio’s championing of Tuscan vernacular inspired Chaucer to see what he could do with his own.” – Aeon