In 2018, 481 U.S. colleges and universities picked common readers – and they prefer new or recent books to classics: “67 percent of common reading books assigned were published after 2011.”
Category: words
Has Contemporary Poetry ‘Abandoned Craft,’ Or Are Its Critics Missing Something Important?
Novelist Rose Tremain and poet Robin Robertson have both railed against contemporary poetry in recent days. Whoops. “Detractors of new poetry make judgments about craft based on conservative assumptions about poetic traditions, forms, style. But radical aesthetics have their own craft and traditions, formed from intersecting political and linguistic concerns. So this isn’t a question of craft at all.”
Aversive Verse: At The Alfred Joyce Kilmer Memorial Bad Poetry Contest
“The judges in the front row were ready to revel in wretchedness, line by line and verse by verse, as the contestants, more than 30 Columbia University students in a lecture hall on the campus, read their poems aloud.” (In case you’ve forgotten, Kilmer is the man who perpetrated “I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree.” He is memorialized with a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike.)
A Crisis Of “Whom”
A few copy editors have proposed a radical solution to the “who/whom” problem: kill off the “whom.” And yet there are those who believe in “whom” and wish to see it used correctly.
The Serious Writing Establishment Embraces TV
In a world in which some of our more successful or esteemed novelists — Margaret Atwood, Gillian Flynn, George R.R. Martin, Salman Rushdie, Kevin Kwan, Neil Gaiman, Tom Perrotta, Noah Hawley, A.M. Homes, Jonathan Ames, Megan Abbott and David Benioff, to name only a few — have written or are writing for the small screen, literary academia has less reason than ever to be sheepish about preparing its charges for the solaces of a healthy paycheck.
Literature Has Often Inspired Movies. But Poetry?
“It’s not often that a poet gets to see their words on a movie theater screen. So much of being a poet is very isolating, sitting in your pajamas over a notebook for 14 hours on end, so it’s cool to get to do something with poetry that’s very collaborative.”
Study: Does Reading Fiction Increase Your Capacity For Empathy?
Psychologists have begun to explore this question by asking whether reading fiction improves people’s sensitivity to other people’s beliefs or emotions compared to either not reading or to reading nonfiction. A paper by David Dodell-Feder and Diana Tamir in the November 2018 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General looked across 14 studies using a technique called meta-analysis to determine whether there is reason to think that reading fiction improves social abilities.
Why Classic Children’s Literature Turned Me Into A Parent Censor
“It’s one thing for me, an adult, to encounter these words, archaic and problematic as they are, understand their origins, and keep reading. But I’m not sure if my kids, aged six and three, are even old enough to grasp the concept of historical context, especially as explained to them by an unprepared, exhausted parent.”
Another New Thing You Can Borrow From The Library: Cooking Utensils
Some libraries in upstate New York have begun adding cake pans, cookie cutters, and other bakeware and utensils to their circulating collections. It’s part of the spreading practice referred to as the “library of things.”
Chinese Author Sentenced To 10 Years In Prison For Gay Erotic Novel
“The writer, surnamed Liu but better known by her internet alias Tianyi, was handed a 10-and-a-half year jail term for ‘producing and selling pornographic materials’ last month, according to a television report on Friday. The book that landed her into trouble was a 2017 novel named Occupy, … about a forbidden love affair between a teacher and a student.” Police assert that the book is full of “graphic depictions of male homosexual sex scenes.”