Category: words

“In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, his son Matt Salinger has finally revealed, definitively, that his father never stopped writing and that almost ‘all of what he wrote will at some point be shared’.” — The Guardian

“This was somebody who was writing for 50 years without publishing, so that’s a lot of material. So there’s not a reluctance or a protectiveness: when it’s ready, we’re going to share it.” When will that be? “We’re definitely talking years. … We’re going as fast as we freaking can.” — The Guardian

Together with an 18th-century directory of sex workers in the Covent Garden area of London, and the violent erotic works of the Marquis de Sade, the Merryland books are among the 2,500 volumes in the British Library’s Private Case collection. The volumes have now been digitised, and are being made available online by the publisher Gale as part of its Archives of Sexuality and Gender academic research resource. – The Guardian

“There’s nobody I know who does words for a living who doesn’t adhere to certain either odd or essentially irrational preferences or distastes. I think you simply need to sort of contain yourself. Like, pick six things you want to be ridiculously stubborn about, not dozens and dozens and dozens of them. You have to choose your irrational battles.” – NPR

“On the face of it, the story of how I wrote my fourth novel – which I was lucky enough to sell for my first comfortable yearly salary – could resemble a heartwarming success story. It could readily be used to justify the trope of the suffering artist; the idea that we produce our best work when experiencing hardship. The truth is, we don’t. It’s a dangerous myth used to systematically devalue artistic labour.” – Irish Times

It was on Valentine’s Day of 1989 that the Ayatollah Khomeini issued his notorious fatwa decreeing that author Salman Rushdie should be executed on grounds of blasphemy for the novel, as should anyone who helped in its release. Riots, death threats, bomb threats and a few murders ensued; Rushdie himself had to spend almost a decade in hiding. Scholar Kevin Blankinship looks back at both “the Rushdie Affair” (which few people under age 30 know about) and what really is, and is not, in the book. — Los Angeles Review of Books

“The proliferation of English words on display at the book fair, where the ‘scène YA’ was set to feature ‘Le Live’, a ‘Bookroom’, a ‘photobooth’ and a ‘bookquizz’, spurred around 100 French writers into action, among them three winners of the country’s Goncourt prize … [to issue] a scalding rebuke to organisers over their use of that ‘sub-English known as globish’.” — The Guardian

This is an excellent time for someone to tell us how to think about these things. Social media has spawned a generation of un-Strunk-and-White-ified people who appear to believe that punctuation is optional, that grammar is for the elderly and that ending a sentence with a period is a deliberate act of aggression. – The New York Times

She’s almost always writing about such horror that it’s incomprehensible. But “Morrison has constructed a language adapted to the needs of a people who of necessity live at once in the present and the past. The animating spirit of her novels — that forked lightning present all at once across time — lights from within the areas of black experience she explores.” – Los Angeles Review of Books