The community-minded Celeste Ng found wide success with her 2014 debut Everything I Never Told You, and absolutely wild success with Little Fires Everywhere, her novel of race, class, and adoption in an idealistic suburb. Her fans – and broadcast adapters – include Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington. Her focus is on lifting others with her: “Ng’s strategic benevolence is aimed at promoting her peers, of course, but also at fixing skewed, reductive notions of representation.” – The New York Times
Category: words
A Renaissance For Aphorisms
The golden age of the aphorism came a century ago, but it’s been revived in recent years, perhaps as a reaction to Pinterest and its inane sayings ensconced in something pretty. The aphorism is different: “The form skips nimbly between these things. It doesn’t commit.” – The Guardian (UK)
A Writer Heads To The Woods To Escape Noise. Here’s What She Learned
A writer I admire once told me, “few people have an imagination when it comes to their lives.” I loved this. It flipped the notion that everyone was doing life right except for me — the common refrain of my consciousness — squarely on its head. The fact that I had abandoned my career at 35 for a pipe dream, didn’t have a partner, and was leaving the greatest city in the world to spend the summer writing in a cabin alone wasn’t wrong, it was imaginative. – Medium
An Independent Seattle Bookstore That’s Thriving On Community
Beloved Seattle bookstores were closing their doors throughout the aughts, and those who remained open seemed to face an impossibly uphill task — who would pay full price for a book when you could buy it for less online? But there’s more to an indie bookstore than the price on a book’s cover. In a manner worthy of a great writer’s unexpected third-act twist, independent bookstores have made an improbable comeback in the past few years, both nationally and locally. – Seattle Times
Has Twitter Made This A Golden Age Of Aphorism?
“‘You’d think so,’ says the poet and aphorist Don Paterson. ‘But there’s absolutely no evidence of it.’ As he sees it, the aphorism is a different thing altogether from what he calls ‘wisdom literature’. Yet aphorisms – even though they haven’t much of a tradition in the anglophone world – are poking green shoots into the likes of Waterstone’s.” — The Guardian
Beyond Scrooge: Charles Dickens’s Strong, Strange Relationship With Christmas
“From his early short essay ‘A Christmas Dinner’ in Sketches by Boz (1836) to his incomplete final novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), in which an uncle appears to have murdered his nephew on Christmas Day, Christmas is sunk into his imagination like a watermark. … [And some friends] observed that Dickens’s enjoyment of Christmas seemed more determined, even ruthless, than one might expect from someone with a genuinely boyish sense of fun.” — Literary Hub
New Comics Publisher Wants To Do For Comics What Streaming Services Did For TV Series (Binge!)
“In an industry where buying monthly, serialized stories is the norm, TKO is presenting an alternative: binge releasing its mini-series; simultaneously selling collected editions of those stories; and offering the first issue of each comic free. TKO is also selling directly to readers and retailers from its website, not through normal distribution channels.” — The New York Times
The Most-Popular Poem Of 2018
More than 250,000 people in 2018 clicked on the poem, which features such lines as “It is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes.” – Washington Post (AP)
Meet ‘The World’s First Sleep Storyteller-In-Residence’
Phoebe Smith writes what are basically bedtime stories for grownups, 20-to-40-minute narratives that are recorded by actors such as Stephen Fry and Joanna Lumley and listened to on an app called Calm, created to help people fall asleep. — The Guardian
New York Times Book Review Editor Responds To Controversy Over Alice Waters’s Book Recommendation
In response to reader queries, Pamela Paul explains why Alice Walker was chosen for the “By the Book” Q&A feature, how the interview was conducted, and why the published feature didn’t include any explanation or context for Walker’s citation of a book and author widely seen as anti-Semitic. — The New York Times