Category: words

The novel, which will be published in the U.S. late next year under the title The Children Who Came After Them, is one of several widely successful recent works of fiction in France to deal with the lives of young people growing up in the country’s poor, de-industrialized towns.

When it comes to actual replacement fees, there’s more than just buying a new copy. I mean, hey, sometimes a library decides not to replace the thing that’s been lost or destroyed. Maybe the item wasn’t circulating all that well anyway or it’s a dead technology (i.e. VHS and microfilm and goddamn laser discs) that the library doesn’t want to keep in stock. Perhaps the patron will just pay a set fee that the library has created a policy for in the event of loss/damage. It’s all up to that particular branch, baby!

The CDN Central Library, designed by the starchitectural firm Snøhetta, physically straddles the light rail line that divides the city’s business and cultural districts from the much-poorer East Village. The city authorities and designers deliberately created a pleasing space for residents of all income levels to use for free, not to mention providing the access to computers and the internet that middle-class people take for granted.

Since joining the organization in 2001, Alice Quinn has steered numerous programs that celebrate poetry through partnerships with prominent cultural organizations, including the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, the Los Angeles Public Library and the New York Botanical Garden.

Within reason, that is. “It’s useless to point out to the storyteller that stereotypes are abundant in real life. The narrator says he’s sorry: look, the thief really was Neapolitan, and there really was laundry hanging in the alley. … In this case stereotypes become functional” — they become a shorthand for the reader, helping the narrative flow smoothly — “the writer obeys rules; the story is a journey with inevitable stopping points – very familiar, yet always enjoyable.”

This past summer, the state Dept. of Corrections introduced a ban on giving books to individual inmates; the rule was part of a suite of measures taken to sten the flow of illegal drugs into prisons. After pushback from prisoners’ rights and book donation groups, the policy has been relaxed, though books will still have to be inspected at a separate location before being given to inmates.

“We invited scholars from across the academy to tell us what they saw as the most influential book published in the past 20 years. (Some respondents named books slightly outside our time frame, but we included them anyway.) We asked them to select books — academic or not, but written by scholars — from within or outside their own fields. It was up to our respondents to define ‘influential,’ but we asked them to explain why they chose the books they did. Here are their answers.”

There are so many factors that kill lit mags. “Radical passion often meets practical reality. Sometimes the fire behind great literary magazines is the exact thing that causes them to burn out. Other magazines lose institutional funding, fold because of scandal, or vanish along with their masthead.”