Category: words

The book is – as any artist, or perhaps businessperson at a retreat, could tell you – The Artist’s Way. The first printing was a 9000 copies, and the publisher worried it wouldn’t sell. “We didn’t know where to put it on the shelves — did it go in religion or self-help? Eventually there was a category called ‘creativity,’ and The Artist’s Way launched it.” – The New York Times

One novelist, who calls herself a Planner (as opposed to a Pantser), says, “What characters do when I let them loose on the page is often unexpected, but I never regret having nailed down what they see out their window as they lie down to sleep.” – LitHub

Amélie Wen Zhao asked her publisher to withhold her book Blood Heir after voices from the Young Adult Lit Twitterverse (which is notorious for drama) attacked it for “anti-blackness” in its depiction of an enslaved group. Aja Hoggatt offers an explainer on the controversy. — Slate

Kurdish-Iranian writer Behrouz Boochani composed his first book, No Friend But the Mountains, one text message at a time from inside the Manus Island detention center in Papua New Guinea, one of the offshore centers where Australia places refugees who try to reach the country by sea. Now that book has won the A$100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature. — The Guardian

At a time when half of all book purchases in the U.S. are made on Amazon — and many of those on mobile — the first job of a book cover, after gesturing at the content inside, is to look great in miniature. That means that where fine details once thrived, splashyprints have taken over, grounding text that’s sturdy enough to be deciphered on screens ranging from medium to miniscule. – New York Magazine

“Some forewords are transitive: acts of seduction that are at the same time documents of earlier seductions. … Other forewords are parasitical; like cuckoos’ eggs laid in crows’ nests they hatch and flourish at the expense of their hosts. … As for prefaces (and afterwords), these may be explanatory, apologetic, triumphal, tendentious, rueful, score-settling, spiteful, bibliographic, theoretical (as is the case with Chandler’s), or gently embarrassed (as is the case with Cheever’s) but the best of them — like Cheever’s — are also what I would call restorative.” — The Paris Review

There are now more comic books published annually in France and Belgium than ever before. “It’s a kind of golden age. There has never been so much talent. There have never been so many interesting books published.” – The New York Times

“[Bart van Es’s] The Cut Out Girl beat Sally Rooney’s widely praised novel Normal People, Stuart Turton’s debut novel The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, JO Morgan’s poetry collection Assurances and Hilary McKay’s children’s book The Skylarks’ War to the award for the year’s ‘most enjoyable’ book.” — The Guardian