“After more than a decade, the Oxford American, a nonprofit literary magazine that explores Southern culture, has finally paid off the entire $700,000 debt it owed the University of Central Arkansas. Since the debt began accumulating in 2004 and peaked in 2008, UCA has seen four presidents, and the nonprofit magazine has parted ways with its founding editor and has a new top editor and executive director.”
Category: words
Are We On The Cusp Of A New Age Of African Literature?
“If so, the key to new novels from African writers seems to be the fresh use of historical fiction to articulate a new future.”
Why The Semicolon Is A Truly Great Punctuation Mark
“Semicolons are useful when two thoughts are related, independent yet interdependent, and more or less equally weighted. They could exist as discrete sentences, and yet something would be lost if they were, an important cognitive rhythm.”
The Onion And Gizmodo Are For Sale – Again
Just two years ago, Univision acquired what became the Gizmodo Media Network from the wreckage of Gawker Media. Now the Spanish-language broadcast network has “initiated a formal process to explore the sale” of the group, which includes, among other sites, The Onion, The A.V. Club, Deadspin, Gizmodo, Clickhole, Jezebel, and The Root.
In 2018, What Makes Someone A ‘Southern Writer’?
“Far more urban, far more ethnically and culturally and politically diverse, the South is no longer a place defined by sweet tea and slamming screen doors, and its literature is changing, too. ‘It is damn hard to put a pipe-smoking granny or a pet possum into a novel these days and get away with it,’ the novelist Lee Smith once said.” Even so, Margaret Renkl has a answer to the question – one that’s paradoxical and somewhat painful.
Oldest Known Excerpt Of Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ Unearthed In Greece
“A team of … researchers found it on an engraved clay plaque in Ancient Olympia, the birthplace of the Olympic Games in the Peloponnese peninsula … Preliminary estimates date the finding to the Roman era, probably before the 3rd century AD.”
The Story Of The Nag Hammadi Codices – Is It Total Bunk?
News of the discovery of these Gnostic manuscripts in 1940s Egypt – manuscripts that ultimately upended everything scholars had thought they knew about early Christianity – came with an all-too-colorful story: precious ancient books lying unnoticed in the desert for generations, exotic peasants engaged in blood feuds stumbling upon the volumes, a last-minute rescue from fire. Nicola Denzey Lewis points out just how improbable (and Orientalizing) it all is, looks at what we know for sure about how the codices were found, and works out a more likely, and more unsavory, story.
Can There Be A Canon Of Western Literature In The Age Of The Internet?
“If the coherence and usefulness of the Western canon seem increasingly untenable today, for reasons that reach beyond ideology, the very concept of a canon — one critically authoritative corpus of thought — now feels harder and harder to countenance. Not only has the unfolding triumph of digital life supplied every claim and every authority with an effectively infinite number of criticisms, the digital revolution has called into profound question how any limited body of knowledge can claim canonical authority over a world where information is infinite.”
What A Dreadful Way To Pick The Winner Of A Book Prize!
The Golden Man Booker. “As a system of selection, this is a curious conflation of the single expert and the wisdom of crowds — or, if you will, super elitism and mob rule. After all, each novel on the shortlist was chosen by just one person (not nearly enough), and yet the winner was chosen by thousands (far too many). Having the unwashed public pick the best novel sounds wonderfully egalitarian, but it ignores all kinds of unanswerable questions about the self-selection and legitimacy of the voters.”
Figuring Out The Mess At Barnes And Noble
“[CEO Demos] Parneros’s termination is the latest in a long line of setbacks for a retail giant trying to stay afloat in the e-commerce era. It’s also the latest reminder of the extent to which Barnes & Noble, once the most disruptive company in publishing, has lost its way.” Alex Shephard looks at what he describes as “quite a lot of strategic incoherence.”