Category: words

Kwame Anthony Appiah, chair of the judges, implicitly blamed editors for the poor quality of some of this year’s submissions while announcing the 2018 shortlist: “We occasionally felt that inside the book we read was a better one, sometimes a thinner one, wildly signalling to be let out.” Fellow judge Val McDermid went further by suggesting modern editors don’t know what they’re doing. “I think,” she said, “young editors coming through are not necessarily getting the kind of training and experience-building apprenticeship that happened when I was starting out.”

Lloyd Alexander, author of the five-volume series The Chronicles of Prydain, was deeply influenced by Sartre; indeed, he was the first to translate Nausea into English. “Despite Alexander’s remarkable role in the history of existentialism, oddly no one has made any connection between that philosophy and his own work” — until Jesse Schotter, here.

The average person “consumes about 34 gigabytes across varied devices each day” — some 100,000 words’ worth of information. “Neither deep reading nor deep thinking can be enhanced by the aptly named ‘chopblock’ of time we are all experiencing, or by 34 gigabytes of anything per day,” Maryanne Wolf argues.

With only one exception, everyone I speak to feels the same: that something has been lost. “A big, big mistake,” says Carmen Callil, co-founder of Virago books and former managing director of Chatto & Windus. “Its USP has gone,” says a leading agent (this despite the fact that he represents some US authors). “This whole fucking thing about us having such a cultural cringe towards America,” says one publisher.

“I’m always more interested in mystery books where ‘whodunit?’ isn’t the biggest question of all. Even if the red herring doesn’t feed into whodunit, because of course it can’t, it feeds into more integral questions: What makes the detective go down that sidetrack? … A bunch of times I’ve started off writing something thinking, ‘This might be the solution’ and then going, ‘This totally can’t be the solution, it doesn’t fit — but I can see why the narrator might want it to be the solution.'”

Most of these new dystopian stories take place in the future, but channel the anger and anxieties of the present, when women and men alike are grappling with shifting gender roles and the messy, continuing aftermath of the MeToo movement. They are landing at a charged and polarizing moment, when a record number of women are getting involved in politics and running for office, and more women are speaking out against sexual assault and harassment.

Growing up with few books in the house was associated with below-average literacy rates, while he presence of around 80 books raised those rates to the mean. Literacy continued to increase with the number of reported books up to around 350, at which point it flattened out.

“The fabled horror magazine that has thrilled and terrified readers since 1979 looked dead and buried last year. But now, just in time for Halloween, Fangoria has crawled out of its own grave in the form of a new quarterly journal with photos so high-gloss that the blood looks wet.”

Hope and its doleful twin, Hopelessness, might be thought of as the co-muses of the modern eco-narrative. Such is the world we’ve created—a world of wounds—that loss is, almost invariably, the nature writer’s subject. The question is how we relate to that loss. Is the glass ninety-five per cent empty or is it five per cent full?

There is no reason why literary translators should not promote their art as an art, as an exercise in making as well as understanding, nor any reason why they should not at least aim for artistic distinction within their own field — even if their art, and their distinction as artists, will always derive from someone else’s work.