Category: words

Utter austerity madness continues, as “712 full-time employees lost or left their jobs and volunteer numbers increased by 3,000.” – The Guardian (UK)

“Last night I dreamt I went to Sweet Valley again.” That’s right: This is why we just can’t quit Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield (and their evil friends), the monsters of teen serial books. – BuzzFeed

“To me, there is something thrilling about thinking through the ideas of our time alongside poems and fiction. Literature, with its idiosyncrasies, its heresies, its visions, can provide a kind of subversive push-pull against what the critic Alexandra Schwartz aptly called ‘the rubbery chew’ of op-ed culture.” – Lithub

“[Ailey] O’Toole’s bizarrely brazen act of plagiarism — stealing lines, phrases, and structural elements from the work of at least three other writers — was uncovered last Friday, unraveling her career at the speed of Twitter, the medium by which her fledgling reputation lived and died.” — Vulture

“Digital publications are currently taxed at 20% in the UK; printed publications have been exempt from VAT since its introduction in 1973, ‘on the general principle of avoiding a tax on knowledge’.” Now that new EU legislation allowing member states to cut VAT on digital publications, “a cohort of voices  … is now urging the government to ‘axe the reading tax’.” — The Guardian

“The new movement is wide-ranging, including everything from Russian science fiction – with a history reaching back into the 19th Century – to Afrofuturism, a movement rooted in experiences of black oppression. It covers Chinese books dealing with revolutionary history and aliens, to futurist Mexican movies about migration and free trade.” Tom Cassauwers has a look at the sci-fi coming from these countries and what it says about them. — BBC

The director of the novel’s 2017 film adaptation, Luca Guadagnino, has said several times that he planned to do a sequel (or perhaps even a franchise along the lines of the Before Sunrise/Before Sunset/Before Midnight series). But the little that the author had said about it wasn’t encouraging. (The novel already includes an epilogue with the two protagonists in middle age.) But a tweet from Aciman this week indicates that he’s changed his mind. — IndieWire

Said Strand owner Nancy Bass Wyden, “The richest man in America, who’s a direct competitor, has just been handed $3 billion in subsidies. I’m not asking for money or a tax rebate. Just leave me alone.” — New York Times