Category: words

Joanna Lumley described the book that won the year she was on the jury as “indefensible”, Rebecca West hated every one of the contenders in both of her years, and the 1976 winner was ultimately chosen by flipping a coin. Then there was the year that Fay Weldon’s agent got slugged by the head of the publishing union.

The death of The Voice isn’t just about the end of a newspaper. To some of us at least, it’s about the end of New York as a cultural and political center, as the place that the world turned to for art, for music, for leadership in new and uncomfortable ideas, often perceived by the mainstream to be dangerous or weird.

“Some people see British poet Ira Lightman as a champion of poets whose verse is being shamelessly ripped off. Others view him as a blowhard who delights in ruining other people’s reputations. … Does Ira valiantly defend the original words and ideas of struggling poets? Or is his sleuthing just a way to feed his need for schadenfreude? In this episode of [The World in Words], Leo [Hornak] and Nina [Porzucki] do a little sleuthing of their own.” (podcast)

Kevin Young analyzes two notorious cases of text theft: Harvard undergrad Kaavya Viswanathan, whose How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life got national press before it was published and even more publicity after reporters and writers discovered that it was almost entirely pastiche, and Adam Wheeler, who plagiarized his way into and through Harvard, nearly got a Rhodes Scholarship and Stanford admission with stolen material, and used so much fake material on his resumes that he ended up in jail for fraud.

“According to experts, autism’s ‘triad of impairments’ (in communication, imagination and social interaction) made literature a bad fit for the autistic brain. … If the mental states of others are beyond their reach, how can they possibly manage the moody jungle-gym of make-believe conflict that we call fiction? And if autistic people struggle with the dowsing rods of metaphor and irony, how can they divine a work’s deeper meanings?” Well, Ralph James Savarese begs to differ.

The festival, sponsored by the Library of Congress since 2001, drew at least 200,000 readers to the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in downtown D.C. They listened to talks and interviews with more than 100 authors, including Amy Tan, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Dave Eggers, Meg Wolitzer and Roxane Gay. Packed rooms were the order of the day for almost all the presentations.

Jeanette Winterson: “The novel … begins with a famously disingenuous sentence: ‘He, for there could be no doubt about his sex … ‘ and then we spend the rest of the novel doubting exactly that. Is Orlando the first English language trans novel? It is, yet in the most playful way. Orlando manages his transition with grace and a profound truth. On seeing himself as a herself for the first time in the mirror, she remarks: ‘Different sex. Same person.'”

Robert Kindred knew these books and journals were nearly impossible to find for sale, and prohibitively expensive even when they could be found. So for the sake of his business he turned to the open shelves of academic libraries. The irony is that the easy access granted him by libraries that summer was heir to the spirit of scientific inquiry in which these magnificent prints were created in the first place.

It’s unlikely to be Amazon, which is forging its own path and has thus far seemed only marginally interested in physical book retail. It’s not clear that Books-a-Million and Half-Price Books, the second- and third-largest general trade book retailers, have the resources, let alone the ambition. One possible candidate, according to multiple sources in book publishing and retail, is the Canadian book seller Indigo, which has defied the bleak trends in publishing in recent years, posting profits and selling literary fiction by the crateload.

If so, then modern technology is not the murderer, writes David Ulin. After all, when books had their greatest power and influence (he cites Thomas Paine’s Common Sense as an example), mass-market printing was cutting-edge technology. That’s not to say that today’s technology isn’t involved in the death, though.