Category: words

Gates appears on the inside cover, calling it “one of the most important books I’ve ever read – an indispensable guide to thinking clearly about the world”. And now he has invited the 4 million students due to graduate in 2018 to download a free digital copy of the book from his website.

“Many contemporary memes and slang terms in mainstream pop culture such as ‘yas Queen’ and ‘throwing shade,’ for example, were appropriated from the unique linguistic practices of the queer community, often coined decades before. It’s a phenomenon that seems to replicate across different cultures, such as Bahasa Gay, a gay speech style of Indonesia, which has made its way into mainstream Indonesian life without the public being particularly aware that gay people even exist. How does this happen?” Linguist Chi Luu explains it all.

The Scottish Borders council is implementing a trial in three schools – in Galashiels, Hawick and Peebles – that will see secondary school pupils and other volunteers taking on roles in school libraries. The pilot initiative follows the loss of several librarian jobs last year, according to reports in the Scottish press, and has been attacked by local parents as well as by literacy experts, trade unions, teachers and librarians.

“Three poetry editors at The Boston Review announced their intent to resign on Tuesday, citing disagreements with the magazine’s executive editors over their decision to retain Junot Díaz as fiction editor … Díaz, who received the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, has been accused by multiple women of verbal abuse and sexual harassment.”

“The novel, titled Little Boy, fuses elements of autobiography, literary criticism, poetry and philosophy, in a headlong, often stream-of-consciousness style. ‘It’s not a memoir, it’s an imaginary me,’ Mr. Ferlinghetti said in a phone interview. ‘It’s an experimental novel, let’s put it that way.'”

“The British Pakistani author’s seventh novel” – which edged out Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing, winner of the US National Book Award – “reworks Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone to tell the story of a British Muslim family’s connection to Islamic State … The [£30,000] annual award, which has been won by authors including Lionel Shriver, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Naomi Alderman in the last two decades, was previously known as the Orange prize and the Baileys prize.”

In September 2017, self-published author Faleena Hopkins filed a trademark claim for the word “cocky” in relation to a romance novel series, which was registered by the US Patent and Trademark Office in April 2018. Only series can be registered as trademarks, not individual titles, and common words can’t be registered at all, unless the public associates it with a particular use.

On a typical day, a narrator might spend between four and six hours in the booth. One finished hour of tape will take two to two and a half hours to record. (According to Business Insider, non-celebrity narrators can command $100 to $500 per finished hour.)

Alan Hollinghurst: “I observe that the gay novel [today] is dissolving back into everything else … I would far rather be living now, on balance, but I think there is more nutrition for the novelist in the earlier period when things were more difficult and gay life was more coded. It is more fascinating to write about something half concealed than something that is completely open.”

Matthew Todd: “Homelessness; HIV (in the west); the way app culture and HIV-prevention drug PrEP are ushering in a new age of sexual liberation; growing hate crime; marriage; the experience of black, Asian and minority ethnic people; transgender people living through hostility in the media reminiscent of the tabloid beating lesbians and gays took in the 80s; the list is endless … And the legacy of gay shame that still leaves LGBT+ people with statistically higher levels of addiction, depression and suicide is only now being aired.”