Category: words

The thing about Little Women was that it wasn’t telling girls and women to be “girly,” or that being independent – and fierce – was a bad thing. The book “was that unusual thing, a classic that is also an instant hit. It was wildly popular from the moment it was published, in two parts, starting in 1868. … The book was also revolutionary, in its way.”

Saadia Faruqi is a Pakistani-American author who decided to step up her interfaith writing after 9/11. She wrote journalism, op-eds, and an acclaimed book of short stories. Then she had kids, and she noticed an issue: “Here we are in multicultural America, where in many cities, including my own hometown of Houston, brown and black is the majority skin color, and yet an overwhelming percentage of children’s books feature white kids. There were certainly not any Muslim or South Asian main characters in early readers, and that’s the age kids are just learning their own identities and deciding if they love reading or hate it.” So, she thought, why not help change that?

Privately owned, the company has moved deliberately, while publicly traded competitors like HarperCollins (which is owned by News Corp) and Simon & Schuster (CBS) have had to fend off pressures from shareholders. It has not used its gargantuan size—it controls more than half of the traditional literary marketplace according to many estimates—to take back territory from Amazon. Instead, it has focused on building equity and ensuring that it publishes the next generation of bestsellers.

“Her works are seen as so easy to read, she’s a favourite author of people learning English. Christie is also, by leaps and bounds, the world’s most translated author – so if many people are learning the English language through Christie, they are learning about the English people through her, too.” And not everything all those folks pick up is bogus.

“Having become a Japanese novelist (once and for all), I may have something of a problem on my hands in saying that I know hardly anything about Japanese fiction.” Considering that Murakami is writing this in his introduction to the English-language Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories, that may indeed be something of a problem. In fact, he maintains here that this makes him an excellent guide to this collection.

“The Voice was a cultural necessity for decades, a springboard for generations of passionate and relentless journalists, critics, and writers … Here, some of the Voice‘s most singular — Gary Indiana, Molly Haskell, J. Hoberman, Vivian Gornick, Melissa Anderson, Robert Christgau, Michael Miller, and Greg Tate — have shared their recollections about what it meant to work at that irreplaceable place.”

Bryan Goldberg, who plans to relaunch the site early next year, wrote to staff in a memo, “We won’t recreate Gawker exactly as it was, but we will build upon Gawker’s legacy and triumphs — and learn from its missteps.”

Even as the Kremlin pushes hard for the continued use of Russian in the former Soviet republics, it has begun discouraging and even suppressing the official use of native languages in the autonomous republics within the Russian Federation (Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, for example) that are home to Russia’s ethnic minorities. Crucially, Moscow is mandating severe cutbacks in the teaching of local languages in schools and firing language teachers (sometimes en masse). But the Bashkirs, Tatars, and others are resisting, especially online.

“The modern aphorism may be modelled on the classical, but it adds to the form a degree of self-consciousness about its own power, motion, drive. Above all, the aphorism is a sharp or pointed thing, violently deployed — though this action can never be definitive, but must be repeated time and again.”

“The unusual prize was dreamed up by Paul Morris, who opened Bookends in [the Welsh town of] Cardigan four years ago. The shop is profitable and would have made an estimated £30,000 in a sale, but Morris said he wanted to give someone else the chance to realise their dream of running a bookshop. Over the last three months, anyone who spent more than £20 was eligible to be entered into a raffle to win it. The name of the winner, Ceisjan Van Heerden, who is from the Netherlands, was drawn out of a hat containing 59 others at a ceremony last week, as Abba’s ‘The Winner Takes It All’ played to a crowd.”