Category: words

Over the past months I spoke with 20 gatekeepers in the fiction world—agents, editors and publishers—to see whether they anticipate a change in the types of stories that shape the American novel. While they were apprehensive about making generalizations, most, if not all, seemed shaken by the realization that they are out of touch with a significant portion of the American electorate. And for several, the only way to remedy that is by actively seeking out stories from Trump country.

Parul Sehgal: “It’s constant panic, and guilt, and shame. Also pajamas. No, it’s a great gig, I’m not going to lie. … It’s monkish, but if you are into that sort of thing, it’s bliss. But with that, I think what propels me is also a feeling of responsibility. It’s also a feeling of working in a very strange genre, in that when you write a book review – and the book reviews we write at the Times are roughly 800 to 1,000 words – you’re serving a lot of masters.” (includes audio)

“Nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and even shortlisted the year before his death, Tanizaki is one of the more prominent figures in modern Japanese literature, and he is also well-known for his other endeavors, such as his translation of The Tale of Genji from old Japanese into the modern language. But on a more personal level, the question is not quite as strange as it might initially appear.

Three members of the secretive committee that selects the winner of the Nobel prize for literature have resigned from the jury in protest at how it has handled the sexual harassment allegations made against a man with close links to the board.

If script is dying, it cannot complain that its day has been short. Its solitary reign may have been ended by the printing press, but it lived on as a citizen in the new republic of letters: official records, account books, botanical drawings, not to mention works for private circulation and personal epistles, continued to be produced by hand for centuries. Then came the typewriter, but even its keys could not strike the death knell of handwriting. Perhaps that machine’s close descendants, the keyboards of our computers and their avatars on our screens, are administering the coup de grâce. Perhaps.

Who knows what the hedge fund might do to the chain? (Take a quick look at the stripped and bankrupted Toys R Us, or newspapers like the Denver Post, or … ) Meanwhile: “The proximity of the sale has caused a delay to increasing the pay of senior booksellers at the chain. The situation has led to some disquiet among senior staff, who were not given a pay rise at the same time as their junior colleagues when the National Minimum Wage rose to £7.83 an hour.”

Indeed: “The lead editorial pulled no punches, describing executives at Alden Global Capital, the paper’s hedge-fund owner, as ‘vulture capitalists.’ ‘We call for action,’ the editorial continued. It went on to make the case that ‘Denver deserves a newspaper owner who supports its newsroom. If Alden isn’t willing to do good journalism here, it should sell The Post to owners who will.'”

The discussion of modernist poet Lola Ridge spurs a call to arms, or rather to pens: “Gender is part of who gets remembered. In 2015, 71.7 percent of biographies were about men and 31 per cent of those were written by women. Only 6 percent of male biographers chose to document a woman’s life. Hence there are far fewer biographies written about or by women than men.”

She mentored Common, inspired Kanye West, and won three Grammys for her own spoken word poetry. “Angelou saw hip-hop’s innate connection to the tradition of poetry. When asked whether she thought of using students’ interest in rap to lead them to poetry, she replied: ‘Absolutely.'”