Category: words

Byline Media, a London-based crowdfunded platform for independent journalism, has launched a book-publishing arm. Byline Books’ first release, A Virtue of Disobedience by Asim Qureshi, “was typeset, proofed, and printed within five weeks of the fundraising effort’s end date, April 25.” Journalist Mark Piesing talks to Qureishi and to Byline Media co-director Stephen Colegrave about the venture.

“I suspect you feel it as well: how to speak about a writer whose work has been meaningful — in my case, profoundly so; I could not imagine my life without it — as well as a source of frustration or real pain. I have admired Naipaul as much as I have found him difficult to admire, a murky admixture that I find difficult to explain or clarify, and which I find with no other writer.” Pankaj Mishra and Nikil Saval exchange letters.

The first novel published to the social media service is Lewis Carroll’s 1865 novel, Alice in Wonderland. The surreal Wonderland-inspired graphics were designed by conceptual illustrator Magoz. The NYPL says they had hoped to mimic the feel and layout of classic books on the screen, with the innovative and engaging element of artistic design on select “pages.”

Wait, so mmhmm counts as a word, even though it’s not in the dictionary? That’s what some academics are arguing – and they say that the word’s origin among enslaved Africans in the U.S. is the reason it never was recognized by dictionaries (and thereby had its spelling standardized).

“Stopping by the ruins” – wuquf ‘ala al-atlal – was one of the primary themes of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry: the poet visits the ruins of a spot where he once camped with his beloved, now lost to him. The trope was already being mocked as a cliché and parodied by the eighth century CE, but it held on, and today a new generation of writers and other artists is using the imagery of the ruins to address the devastation caused by wars and violence in the Arab world.

The “death of poetry” has been predicted with such frequency that it’s become a mordant joke, as have the “Poetry is dead, long live poetry!” rejoinders; everywhere, though, are reminders that these debates can miss the broader point. Poetry can’t die, any more than air or water can meet such an end, because poetry in the more expansive sense is not “poetry” in the narrow. Poetry is permeative; it is currency; and it is, thankfully, too big to die.

The reason no one’s reading War and Peace is, Clay Shirky asserted, because it’s “too long, and not so interesting.” Instead of mourning the loss of the “cathedral” reading experience offered by a great 19th-century novel, we should be adapting to the “bazaar” culture of the internet. If the medium trains our supremely adaptable brains to work differently, well, maybe that’s because they need to work that way to take advantage of “the net’s native forms.”

“When Little Man, Little Man was first published in 1976, critics didn’t know what to make of an experimental, enigmatic picture book that straddled the line between children’s and adult literature. It received lukewarm reviews and quickly went out of print. Now, roughly four decades later, Baldwin’s relatives have resurrected the work, with a new edition from Duke University Press, and it could scarcely be more timely.”

The book was just published by Knopf, and is already a top seller on Amazon, and got the kind of author profile in last Sunday’s The New York Times that is usually jet fuel for a book to film deal. Trouble is, the author is in prison until 2020 for committing the bank robberies that are described in harrowing detail in the novel. And late this week, he ran out of phone minutes and will not be able to entertain any offers until he can again use the jailhouse phone on Sunday.