Category: words

“Merriam-Webster‘s … original goal [was] to create and preserve a monolithic American culture. Noah Webster Jr., the dictionary’s founding author, was one of the first American nationalists, and he wrote his reference books with the express purpose of creating a single definition of American English – one that often existed at the expense of regional and cultural variation of any kind.”

The “world’s first novel” is an epic quest, full of monsters and trials by combat – and kids who grew up on Marvel, Star Wars, and video games really get it.

In Mary H.K. Choi’s Emergency Contact, she writes about a young woman’s love for her mother, and the young woman’s falling in love, through texts, with a guy. “It’s a difficult balancing act — steering through the assimilation experience without contributing to clichéd narratives. … Choi’s novel blows up Asian female stereotypes and prods readers to question their own cultural biases about women of color.”

They’re fed up and don’t want to take it anymore, after the last two years of the prize have resulted in wins from U.S. authors. “The crescendo of frustration may have reached a peak. A group that counts the literary heavyweights Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan and Zadie Smith among its members has fired a shot across the bow, demanding that the Man Booker Foundation reverse a 2014 decision making any novel written in English and published in Britain eligible for the prize.”

“A strong case could be made for [Gerald] Murnane, who recently turned 79, as the greatest living English-language writer most people have never heard of. … Yet his work has been praised by J.M. Coetzee and Shirley Hazzard, as well as young American writers like Ben Lerner and Joshua Cohen. Teju Cole has described Murnane as ‘a genius’ and a ‘worthy heir to Beckett.’ Last year, Ladbrokes placed his odds at winning the Nobel Prize for Literature at 50 to 1 – better than Cormac McCarthy, Salman Rushdie and Elena Ferrante.” Mark Binelli goes to visit the author in his tiny village five hours from Melbourne, where Murnane promised him “an interview unlike any you’ve done before.” (He was as good as his word.)

In the years they occupied Iraq’s second city, the extremists burned tens of thousands of books and torched the widely admired university’s library. NYRB‘s reporters meet with librarians, law professors, and a literature lover who has opened a library/café.

When Islamabad was built as the capital of a newly independent Pakistan, it was the “old bookshops” that gave the neighbourhoods a spirit and character beyond the insipid soullessness that pervades purpose-built cities. Now their accelerating disappearance tells a story of the seismic political and commercial shifts that have taken place here over the past two decades.

“Three years since the Man Booker began allowing any author writing in English and published in the UK to enter, 99% of Folio Academy members who responded to the question have said that the Booker should change its rules again, with most responses citing the new ubiquity of US authors in the prize’s longlists.”

The American author is this year’s winner of the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, funded by the Swedish government in honor of the author of the Pippi Longstocking books. “Woodson made her children’s debut in 1990 with Last Summer with Maizon, first in a trilogy exploring the friendship of two girls. Her 2014 memoir-in-verse, Brown Girl Dreaming, received the National Book Award.”