Category: words

Publisher and editor-in-chief Win McCormack: “Given the current costs of producing a print literary magazine, I have decided to shift resources to Tin House’s other two divisions: Tin House Books and the Tin House Workshop. … We will continue to publish original fiction, nonfiction, and poetry online at tinhouse.com.” — Literary Hub

Jim Copp, an erstwhile jazz performer and L.A. Times society columnist, wrote and narrated the stories, sang the songs, played the instruments, created the sound effects, and layered the tracks (dozens of them) on nine different records between 1958 and 1971. And they still hold up today, even for grown-ups. — The New Yorker

The Nobel laureate had evidently intended to publish them sometime in 1994. Then he lost track of them after a very, very bad day. Two decades on, a critic in Cairo came upon them while searching for something else entirely. — Literary Hub

“The style guides say: keep your sentences short. … But sometimes a sentence just needs to be long. The world resists our efforts to enclose it between a capital and a full stop. The sentence has to withhold its end because life is like that, refusing to fold itself neatly into subject, verb and object.” — Literary Hub

What always seemed most remarkable about the American Heritage Dictionary was its promise to be more discriminating than other dictionaries, and the evidence for this was always its panel of expert language users whose opinions were solicited on many contentious points of usage. This usage panel was presented as a major feature of the dictionary and became a point for endorsement and criticism. – The Weekly Standard

Louis Menand: “If we pick up a novel about life in the barrio, or a book by a Tibetan monk, or an avant-garde literary magazine, we know what we expect to find. We are complicit in the attempt to get us to believe because we already want to believe. Writing … has to rely on readers bringing a lot of preconceptions to the encounter, which is why it is so easily exploited. Does this mean it’s all a game? Yes, in a sense.” — The New Yorker

In a television landscape where literature has become largely overlooked, late-night hosts like Mr. Meyers and Trevor Noah have made it their mission to put a spotlight on writers — giving them an enormous amount of influence in the publishing world. – The New York Times

“My research finds that a prize’s long-term success actually depends on these kinds of low and embarrassing episodes, which attract public investment into the very market for symbolic capital that makes prizes necessary and keeps them afloat.” James English explains how this phenomenon plays out. — Public Books

The country’s two major bookstore chains are in or near bankruptcy and are closing so many stores that many cities will be left with no place to buy books. The head of one Brazilian publishing firm has been reduced to pleading with the public to buy books as Christmas gifts. — The Guardian