Category: words

The paper has struggled as a business for decades and has a terrible history of cutting its cultural coverage, repeatedly signalling its lack of investment in the life of the city. –DMagazine

For the second year in a row, statistics show that indies are doing better than fine. That comes after a steady 20-year decline, so the numbers still feel surprising. – The Guardian (UK)

But he was in his 40s, and so it wasn’t as filled with possibility and joy as it might have been when he was in his 20s. “The bookstore is a liminal space. Even if like me you don’t have the cash to buy a box of new titles and reinvent yourself week to week, you have the moment of the choosing and everything it tugs upon.” – LitHub

Heck yeah, books and beer. Or really, books and a brewpub. How is this not in every city in the U.S. already? – The New York Times

“I had, I think, finally been introduced to the private world of reading that many people inhabit; a dream state I now regard as a portal to the act of breathing life into fictional worlds of one’s own. That first Murdoch novel seemed like a belief system transformed into story, given to me to make of it what I wanted, on my own.” – The New York Times

After a nearly 16-year run, The Millions, which was truly one of the last outposts of the early 2000s book blogging culture, has made a decision: “While the magazine’s coverage of books, arts, and culture [will] continue, it will now be as a property of PWxyz, the parent company of Publishers Weekly.” – Vulture

Wow, who knew? The news really is that things have gotten worse for authors, and there’s no surprise about the culprit: “The decline in earnings is also largely because of Amazon’s lion’s share of the self-publishing, e-book and resale market.” – The New York Times

It was a big year in literary deaths. End-of-an-era stuff… – LitHub

Once a writer dies, their work is controlled by an estate. Of course. But that control can often result in censorship, unreasonable demands for fees, and suppression of scholarship. Pity the poor scholar/biographer searching for insight… – New Statesman

“The clue for 2 down in the New York Times‘ first crossword puzzle of the new year was nothing unusual: ‘Pitch to the head, informally.’ But the answer stopped many puzzlers in their tracks. … It was a minor dust-up, all things considered, but it says something about the state of crossword puzzles in 2019.” — Slate