Category: words

In a statement issued the afternoon before the Fourth of July holiday, the troubled bookstore chain announced that Demos Parneros had been terminated without severance pay for unspecified “violations of the Company’s policies.” (The statement did say that Parneros’s dismissal had nothing to do with financial malfeasance or fraud.)

Archival research has its moments: Yeats scholar John Kelly “was browsing the catalogue of Princeton University Library, where he had pored over Yeats’s holdings some years earlier, when he spotted a file of 17 letters to the poet’s publisher he had not seen before. He discovered from the librarian it had been stolen in the 1970s, disappearing without trace until it turned up recently, delivered anonymously in a brown package.”

Peter Carey, two-time Booker winner, doesn’t think that the U.S. should be part of the conversation or the competition: “I am sure that American prizes don’t give a stuff about Australians or New Zealanders or Canadians, or any of those voices. An English prize does because there is still a family connection, a cultural connection that really does mean something.”

That decision came with input from, to put it mildly, a lot of people: “The one-off award, voted for by the public, commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Man Booker prize. The shortlist of five novels was selected by a panel of judges from the 51 previous winners of the Man Booker, which honors the best novels written in English and published in Britain or Ireland.”

How was Barracoon funded? None of the PR has focused on this aspect of the book. And “like it or not, Barracoon bears Mason’s indelible mark. It was written on her schedule, under her pressure, and with her money. The 2018 edition of the text even opens with the bizarre dedication that Hurston, respecting her patron’s insistence on privacy, never included in her typed manuscript: ‘To Charlotte Mason, My Godmother, and the one Mother of all the primitives, who with the Gods in Space is concerned about the hearts of the untaught.'”

Or at least romance writers are. Some of the publishers aren’t there yet. “Even as the genre has evolved to reflect readers’ varied tastes and fetishes — popular subcategories include vampire and werewolf romance, military romance, cowboy romance, time travel romance, pirate and Viking romance — the lead characters are often confined to a fairly narrow set of ethnic, cultural and aesthetic types.”

Buying them is expensive, for one thing. But there are also rights issues, payment issues, and, oh yes, Amazon’s Audible service, which stand as obstacles in the increasingly popular audio book space.

Although it’s true that old white men have always run the large, moneyed, century-old rare-book trade—buying and selling books for a living—women have made enormous inroads as private and institutional collectors. Things started shifting in the seventies. Second-wave feminism gave women a voice, and female collectors started patching the historical holes by seeing value and relevance in objects that men had ignored. When you put your gaze on a manuscript and call attention to it, you create value in the eyes of others. Curiosity creates a market.

“The simplest definition may be best: To write clearly means that another person can understand what we mean. Someone (not us) can figure out what we are trying to say. Of course, an intelligent seven-year-old could point out the problems with this.”

“Most long-term migrants know what it’s like to be a slightly rusty native speaker. The process seems obvious: the longer you are away, the more your language suffers. But it’s not quite so straightforward. In fact, the science of why, when and how we lose our own language is complex and often counter-intuitive. It turns out that how long you’ve been away doesn’t always matter. Socialising with other native speakers abroad can worsen your own native skills. And emotional factors like trauma can be the biggest factor of all.”