Category: words

Mira T. Lee: “I always told myself that once I’d written the book I wanted to write, anything else would be gravy. But suddenly I find myself plagued by feelings of insecurity and inadequacy, everything from ‘Will my sales meet my publisher’s expectations?’ to ‘Why didn’t that reader like my book?’ I thought I was old enough to be over all that ego-type stuff, but it’s a constant battle to stay grounded.”

The Staunch prize, founded by a screenwriter who was fed up with all of the sexual violence on TV and in the movies in Britain, “will disqualify any work that does not meet its criteria of no woman in the story being ‘beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped or murdered.'”

Though Amazon has 83 percent of the United States’ ebook business, Kobo and Walmart may be a potent competitor. But that’s not all: “In addition to bringing ebooks to Walmart customers in the US, the companies will also jointly launch a grocery delivery service in Japan.”

We should be clear that when we lament the ‘fake news’ take over we are talking about media illiteracy, not actual fake news. Fake news was originally reported in our current public discourse to describe actual false information knowingly posted by bloggers in Macedonia who were gaming the system to get more clicks to make money from ads on their websites, as reported by Craig Silverman and Lawrence Alexander in Buzzfeed.  Facts may be framed within a news story in interpretations that are biased.  Fake news has come to be used to dismiss news that has a bias with which we disagree thanks to Trump’s co-opting of the term.

“Lorraine Smith’s detective story began at her second-hand bookshop in Warrnambool, Australia, when a customer came to her with what looked like a piece of paper. It had been hiding in an old copy of Alice in Wonderland, the customer said, that she had paged through while browsing in the back of the store. … Smith grew determined to discover what this manuscript was and where it had come from. What was that obscure writing? Who was the document’s original owner? And how did it end up in Australia?”

“A half century before the poet Claudia Rankine used her MacArthur ‘genius’ grant to establish an institute partly dedicated to the study of whiteness, [William Melvin] Kelley turned his considerable intellect and imagination to the question of what it is like to be white in this country, and what it is like, for all Americans, to live under the conditions of white supremacy – not just the dramatic cross-burning, neo-Nazi manifestations of it common to his time and our own but also the everyday forms endemic to our national culture.”

BBC media editor Amol Rajan analyzes font choices, front-page layout, and the sections, and finds that “this redesign is agreeable, attractive, and likely to be effective – except in one crucial regard.”

“The eerie thing about these nights in Montecito has to do with absence. The absence, first of all, of my neighbors, almost all of whom are under a mandatory evacuation order. They are gone, their houses dark, their cars rolling down other streets altogether – or, in the worst cases, crushed as if for repurposing in the scrap yard.”

“The book was written about 1,000 years ago, at a time when a lot of literature was still produced by scribes, collected from various sources and cobbled together by editors. The foundational epics and religious texts in circulation then were very different from the reading material we’re used to. In that context, Murasaki’s diary felt to me like a turning point in the history of literature—it sounds so recognizable, so intimate, so modern.”