Category: words

Russian investigators are probing a version of the alleged crime that both men were avid readers to pass the lonely hours in the Antarctic station. But Savitsky had become angered that Beloguzov ‘kept telling his colleague the endings of books before he read them’.

“Human rights activists and publishers have raised grave concerns over the closure of the People’s Bookstore, a tiny shop in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay district, known to be the last source of literary contraband in the city … The closure follows the disappearance and detention of five city booksellers in 2015, who were linked to the Mighty Current publishing house that produced critical books about China’s leadership.”

“I’m apprehensive about the limitations inherent in canonization, mainly canon’s inadequate literary representation of difference as tokenism, and the prohibitive inaccessibility for those who can’t afford education at the highest levels. So it’s not a canon exactly, but a corpus. It’s something more like a body: mutable, evolving, flexible, open, exposed, exposing. It’s the opposite of erasure; it’s an inscription.”

“When James Joyce wrote the ‘The Dead,’ which eventually became the last story in Dubliners, it was as though he sought to resurrect those whom he had buried with mockery and distancing in an earlier story for the collection, Grace. … The story was also based on an event in his father’s life, but this time instead of recounting it, Joyce began to dream it, reimagine it, and offer it a sort of grace that the previous story had significantly lacked.”

On the day of the second-ever Gay Pride celebration in Orange City, Iowa, Paul Dorr, director of a “crisis center and pro-life, pro-family movement” called Rescue the Perishing read from a blog post titled “May God And The Homosexuals of OC Pride Please Forgive Us!” and threw the library books into a burning trash can. The public library and local police department are discussing legal action.

What have scientists figured out? First of all, while learning to talk is a natural process that occurs when children are surrounded by spoken language, learning to read is not. To become readers, kids need to learn how the words they know how to say connect to print on the page. They need explicit, systematic phonics instruction. There are hundreds of studies that back this up. But talk to teachers and many will tell you they learned something different about how children learn to read in their teacher preparation programs.

No, it’s not just the political climate that’s making fiction sales dive – that’s been going on since 2013 (with a blip in 2015 for Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman). What are the causes of the rise of nonfiction and the fiction tumble?

Elaine Katzenberger runs the bookstore founded by Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and she oversees the publishing wing too – the one made famous in the 1950s for the publication of Allan Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems. She’s glad indie bookstores seem to be holding their own, for now.

Well, as Scrooge in the majority of A Christmas Carol, anyway. Posy Simmonds, author of Gemma Bovary and Tamara Drewe, is ready to let her grump loose on the world. “I start in notebooks and was drawing a character who I thought might run an art gallery. I’ve always thought that, with rare exceptions like Mrs Danvers [from Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca], women really aren’t allowed to be total rotters.”