Category: words

And for Ferrante readers, the column may seem, indeed, imbued with the very essence of the writer: “We always look at first times with excessive indulgence. Even if by their nature they’re founded on inexperience, and so as a rule are not very successful, we recall them with sympathy, with regret. They’re swallowed up by all the times that have followed, by their transformation into habit, and yet we attribute to them the power of the unrepeatable.”

“Now, in her weekly column for the Guardian‘s Weekend magazine, Ferrante will share her thoughts on a wide range of topics, including childhood, ageing, gender and, in her debut article, first love. … The column will be translated by Ferrante’s regular collaborator Ann Goldstein.”

“Poetry is changing, and the way people read is changing,” Alana Wilcox, editorial director of Coach House, told the Star. “We live in a Twitter world now — what does that mean for poetry?” Coach House still has six poetry titles planned for publication this year and another six for 2019.

Writers are so often responding to questions that haven’t explicitly been asked, which perhaps is why our work is so difficult to measure and reward. The system in which we must live says to us, “What are you even for?”

“The delusion isn’t that criticism is important; it is important, the more so as discourse increasingly takes the form of people screaming at each other on the internet. The delusion is that critics can ever transcend the subjectivity that makes good criticism so interesting in the first place. And if a certain negativity, even a certain schadenfreude, attaches to that subjectivity, well, would you rather have a pretended objectivity that observes all the proprieties and never risks giving offense?”

The webzine founded by Choire Sicha, Alex Balk, and David Cho in 2009 was eclectic and quirky: “On any given day, The Awl might play host to a story about colloidal silver, a guide to killing possums before they kill your chickens, or a novella-length examination of the TV show Adventure Time; there might be Q&As with salesmen of high-end vacuum cleaners, or a dive into McDonald’s marketing of its McRib sandwich.” As it and its sister site The Hairpin close due to insufficient ad revenue, former contributor Bijan Stephen pays tribute.

Leading the list is Margaret Atwood, thanks to the TV versions of The Handmaid’s Tale and Alias Grace. Runners-up are Sarah Perry and Helen Dunmore; Elena Ferrante came in at number five, followed by the only man in the top ten, Haruki Murakami.

“One is like the English term – té in Spanish and tee in Afrikaans are two examples. The other is some variation of cha, like chay in Hindi. Both versions come from China. How they spread around the world offers a clear picture of how globalization worked before ‘globalization’ was a term anybody used.”

Over the years, people have asked if I noticed a difference between books on tape and reading print, and the answer is I don’t know. Sporadic reader that I had been, it was hard to say if the words read with my ears reached my brain differently from everything I had read with my eyes. For every study that shows comparably complex brain activity during both methods of reading, there’s a respected author or critic who discredits audio books as shortcuts or cheating.

“It’s not a good time to be trying to sell a UK High Street retailer in light of higher [business] rates, Brexit, and some tough leases. That worries me. It’s important that it’s bought by a good owner, but who? It could even be Amazon, which would be disastrous and one would hope for Competition Authority intervention in that case, although they sometimes look the other way.”