Category: words

Eudora Welty and Richard Ford will also be getting markers in a new series stretching across the state. Will Richard Wright make the cut? That’s yet to be decided.

“Worthless” books priced at up to thousands, of dollars on Amazon.com and which contain only nonsensical text have been identified as possible vehicles for money laundering by an author whose name was, he says, used to send almost $24,000 (£17,200) to an unknown and fraudulent seller.

Chris Harris: “I imagine it’s popular in grade schools because it’s a simple format. Then again, My Dinner with André has a simple format, but I’m guessing it doesn’t play gangbusters at a nine-year-old’s birthday party. … Experiencing poetry solely through prefab formal structures like haikus, acrostics, cinquains and diamante poems could make students feel like poetry is just some sadistic fiend’s attempt to make English even more complex and irritating. ‘POETRY: It’s like regular writing, but with even more rules!'”

“In interviews, he seemed to delight in airing his grievances about other writers’ work, especially when he considered them unfairly beloved by the public. Reading his complaints half a century later, I have to say, I delight in them too. At a time when the literary world seems determined to swear that every book is Good because it is a Book, Nabokov’s outspoken anti-book opinions feel almost ecstatically transgressive.”

As we try to navigate through an age defined by particularly egregious bullshit, writers have a moral obligation to avoid infecting the universe with more careless storytelling. It’s a privileged viewpoint to declare that the only thing in the world that matters is my personal interpretation of events.

If Stuart Kells wants to show that libraries are human places, he has also chosen stories that reveal their venal side. His librarians can be thieves, hoarders, or shameful caretakers. Even when they love books, they can’t be trusted with them. In its ideal form, a library protects books, celebrates them, and also makes them available to a wide group of readers. In this history, any single library rarely achieves all of these goals at once.

“[The author] told fans today that the long-awaited sixth volume in his Game of Thrones fantasy series, The Winds of Winter, would not be published this year – but softened the blow by revealing that his ‘imaginary history’ of the Targaryen family in Westeros would be released on 20 November. Fire and Blood is set 300 years before the events of A Song of Ice and Fire and … will chronicle ‘the Targaryen civil war that nearly ended their dynasty forever’.”

“On the occasion of the four-hundredth anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death, New Yorker writers” – Elif Batuman, Richard Brody, Larissa MacFarquhar, Vinson Cunningham, Rebecca Mead, Philip Gourevitch, Louis Menand, and others – “share their experiences of reading, watching, studying, performing, memorizing, and falling in love with the work of the Bard.”

Mathematics and poetry are both “formats that can convey multiple meanings.” In mathematics, a single object or idea might take different forms. A quadratic equation, for example, can be understood in terms of its algebraic expression, perhaps y=x2+3x-7, or in terms of its graph, a parabola. Henri Poincaré, a French polymath who laid the foundations of two different fields of mathematics in the early 1900s, described mathematics as “the art of giving the same name to different things.” Likewise, poets create layers of meaning by utilizing words and images that have multiple interpretations and associations. Both mathematicians and poets strive for economy and precision, selecting exactly the words they need to convey their meaning.

Michael Cunningham: “The AIDS epidemic didn’t mean the end of dancing, or sex, or drugs. It didn’t have much effect at all on the general interest in youth, beauty and money. But it’s putting it mildly to say that this new guest, the silently grinning one standing by itself in a corner, dankened and befouled the atmosphere.”