Category: words

“With all its gizmotopian technosyncrasies, it cannot actually compete with your neighborhood shop. It stocks too few books, its approach is too robotically data-driven, its employees are not remarkably knowledgeable about books, it is selling toys and e-gadgets as much as (or more than) books, it is not a cozy place to browse or to discover something you did not already know about.” Yes, fine – but Amazon is also still a huge threat to independent bookstores and to publishing itself.

Basically, the only fix is antitrust legislation against Amazon. Meanwhile: “Barnes & Noble is in trouble. You hear that, in worried tones, when you talk to people in the book business. You feel it when you walk into one of the chain’s stores, a cluttered mix of gifts, games, DVDs (DVDs?) and books. And you really see the problems if you dig into the company’s financial statements.”

Yes, this is real – and no, it’s not funny for the authors whose livelihoods depend on having their books up on Amazon and Audible for the voracious erotic-romance-reading public to find. (Here is more background.)

Here’s why, according to writer and teacher Joanna Russ: “The myth of the isolated achievement so often promotes women writers’ less good work as their best work. For example, Jane Eyre exists, as of this writing, on the graduate reading list of the Department of English at the University of Washington. … Villette does not appear on the list. How could it? Jane Eyre is a love story and women ought to write love stories; Villette, ‘a book too subversive to be popular,’ is described by Kate Millett as ‘one long meditation on a prison break.'”

Margo Jefferson, whose On Michael Jackson is being republished with an updated introduction, explains: “He was the best performer at his peak – an all-encompassing dancing, singing artist in the theatrical tradition of Fred Astaire, Sammy Davis Jr, Jackie Wilson, James Brown, with an acute sense of the mise en scène. He craved omniscient superstar status – a need to top himself with more record sales, bigger audiences, than the last time. By the time I was writing this book, he had become emblematic of complicated dilemmas, cultural obsessions, racial, gender and body metamorphoses.”

Author and cultural commentator Nicole Chung on why Chee’s work resonates so much with her: “Alex said he ‘wanted to plant that flag in the culture,’ and until he said that I don’t know if I’d thought about it as a reason to write. The need to exist in the canon, in the literary world. I found that very powerful, and very brave.”

We’re not even talking about the assaults and abuses alleged to have been committed by various male authors – no, this is about the Nobel committee itself. “At the root of the institution’s unprecedented crisis are a raft of wide-ranging allegations against Jean-Claude Arnault, a photographer and leading cultural figure in Sweden, who is married to Katarina Frostenson, an academy member and author.”

It’s easy to say what a bad translation is. The ones that are accidentally jagged like the person wielding the scissors was drunk. The ones where someone has misunderstood the original, or perhaps misinterpreted it. The ones where all individuality has been smoothed out. But how do we identify a successful translation? When have we done our job well? What is it we want to achieve, beyond mere fluidity?

“The fictional children of the past frolicked on the heather-clad slopes of Kirrin Island or battled the armies of evil at Hogwarts, free from the restrictions of their parents. Today, according to [Philip Womack], novelists are eschewing adventure stories for ‘claustrophobic’ domestic dramas and creating ‘a depressing children’s literary landscape’ in the process.”