Category: words

“Thanks to the newfound abundance of text-based communications tools, and the social networks that allow us to discover or rediscover potential correspondents, friendships conducted entirely through text exchange are once again the norm. Would these friendships look familiar to the letter-writing friends of earlier centuries, when epistolary friendships were also common? Or is there something essential that we have lost – or at least changed – in moving the text-based friendship from page to screen?”

Slate‘s Aisha Harris talks with Beth McGuire, who “is the director of speech and dialects at Yale, author of African Accents: A Workbook for Actors, and previously worked with stars Lupita Nyong’o and Danai Gurira on the latter’s Tony-nominated play Eclipsed.”

With the entire comic-strip genre undergoing changes of medium (from paper to pixels), generation (the creators of many newspaper mainstays have been dying off or retiring), and audience (Millennials don’t tend to get their news or their cartoons on newsprint, and they prefer big events to day-to-day consistency), Ernie Smith argues that the remarkable stagnancy stability of the comics page needs a major shake-up.

“From the start of his career, Kadare broke with the prescribed literary mode of socialist realism to write fiction rooted in history, myth, and allegory. But he never became a full-on dissident. Doing so probably would have meant execution. … He saw his books banned and experienced internal exile, but he also served as a minister of parliament. … He describes his own relationship to the dictator as a game of ‘cat and mouse’: He wanted to survive, remain in his homeland, and continue writing; [Enver] Hoxha ‘didn’t want to be seen as an enemy of writers.'”

“I was a relatively late convert to the e-reader, getting my Kindle five years ago when it became clear that reading 600 pages of A Suitable Boy while breastfeeding wasn’t going to work,” writes author Erin Kelly (He Said/She Said). “Hachette Livre CEO Arnaud Nourry recently called ebooks ‘stupid’ – but last summer, they changed my life” as both author and reader.

The 33-year-old alt-right troll provocateur “sued for breach of contract in July 2017 after the cancellation of his book Dangerous, claiming that Simon & Schuster violated the terms of their deal to publish following public outrage. Simon & Schuster claimed that the book had ‘substantial problems.'”

“A municipal council committee, tasked with deciding on the award, this week revoked its earlier decision to honour the famous author, who is also an outspoken critic of the current political climate in Turkey. The committee has so far given no explanation for revoking the decision which had previously passed unanimously by the seven councillors.” The head of the ruling party in the Bosnian capital is close, personally and politically, to Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

“It’s the limit of the ebook format. The ebook is a stupid product. It is exactly the same as print, except it’s electronic. There is no creativity, no enhancement, no real digital experience,” said Arnaud Nourry.

“Egyptian poetry can come across as leaden and cryptic in English translation, which is why [Richard Bruce] Parkinson” – an Egyptologist who recently translated one of the civilization’s most popular narratives, The Tale of Sinuhe – “got his friend, New Zealand-born novelist and veteran Hammer film actor Barbara Ewing, to record a dramatic rendering. She gives it staggering-hearted new life.” (includes video)