The question isn’t how difficult a book is, but why it’s difficult. What is it doing with its difficulty? What is it asking of the reader? Does that difficulty reward the reader’s investment of time? You’re entitled, as James Marriott did in the Times, to conclude that in this case the view from the top of Snowdon wasn’t worth the hike. But complaining about the hike per se is to give up on the idea that there might be any case for art that rewards an investment of energy and attention from its consumer.
Category: words
Canadian Literature Is Good. But Why Is It So Safe?
We have incentivized a safe, cloying storytelling rooted in domestic perspectives and intimate conflicts. These novels generally feature a personal issue (abandonment by a parent, bereavement, breakup) processed through or alongside a traumatic historical incident (say, the clearing of the Newfoundland outports) with some vague connection to the protagonist (typically a university professor, historical researcher, or some other middle-class intellectual with enough time to visit archives). Before the story wraps up, there is certain to be a tepid love affair, several flashbacks, and a well-timed lyrical riff affirming the human spirit or the redemptive power of art. Moral questions will lend the story a patina of gravitas, but there will be no attempt to reckon with the complex roots of social or political problems.
Calgary’s New Public Library Tries To Bridge The City
As a library, its details are impressive: The building has four floors, 240,000 square feet of internal space, a podcast and YouTube production studio, a performance hall, a grand reading room, a children’s library, a digital commons, heated handrails, an interior blending hyper-modern touches with traditional wood at almost every turn and $500,000 in indigenous placemaking work, mostly in the form of artworks. It also has 450,000 books.
The Hottest U.S. Literary Trend Isn’t American Literature At All
Nope. It’s books in translation. Why? Maybe the internet, or cell phones, or something entirely different – but the National Book Foundation is about to add a National Book Award for Translated Literature, the first new prize for the National Book Awards in more than 20 years.
Author AL Kennedy Says Everything Is Terrible, But Now’s Not The Time For Despair
Kennedy, who’s a comedian as well as a novelist, says that “imagination is at the bottom of democracy, at the bottom of civilised behaviour and at the bottom of not behaving like a sociopath.”
An Ode To Glimmer Train, The Literary Journal With A Heart
The founders of Glimmer Train, two Portland sisters who created the literary journal with some software money, have been running it since 1994 – and now they’ve announced that the it will have its final issue in 2019. “They decided they wanted a journal with content as high in quality as any other, but also — and this is one of the areas that set them apart — they wanted it to be fun.”
A New Biography Of George Washington Situates Him Firmly In A World Of Native Americans, And Brings Up New Historical Questions
How important was Washington’s addiction to land speculation to the course of American history? Kind of important – and undiscussed in most biographies. “As America’s god of the passage from colony to nation, Washington looked east to the past and west to the future. And when he faced west, he faced Indian country.”
Ten-Year-Old Seattle Arts Magazine Folds
“The loss of this particular team and what they brought as a storytelling methodology and philosophy to this city is not a minor loss. It’s the biggest loss. The mission we started this company with is still something this city really, really needs.”
Why Four Of The World’s Earliest Books Inspire Awe
So why are these four books so special? It has to do, I think, with the concept of the original—a concept we have almost entirely lost touch with. The Beowulf Manuscript is not just composed of words that serve as the basis for every translation of the epic poem. It’s foremost an object, the only one of its kind. It is not merely a representation of a story; it is the story.
After Worldwide Booksellers’ Rebellion, Amazon’s AbeBooks Backs Off Ban Of Merchants From Certain Countries
“AbeBooks had told bookshops in countries including Hungary, the Czech Republic, South Korea and Russia that it would no longer support them from 30 November, citing migration to a new payment service provider as the reason for the withdrawal. The move prompted almost 600 booksellers in 27 countries to pull more than 3.5m titles from AbeBooks’ site.” AbeBooks’ CEO apologized for the “bad decision.”