Category: words

“An anomaly in the Man Booker prize rules that made books published in Ireland ineligible for the £50,000 award because they were not published in the UK has been removed, after years of frustration among Irish presses.”

“French publishing house Gallimard has insisted it will go ahead with the publication of the 1,000-page collection of 1930s pamphlets by Céline, who called for the extermination of Jews. The publication date is not set but Gallimard has insisted its intention is to frame the texts ‘and put them back in their context as writings of a great violence, marked by the antisemitic hatred of the author’. … A furious row has raged in literary circles between those for and against publication.”

The New York-based PEN America and California-based PEN Center USA told The Associated Press on Monday that they will be called PEN America. Suzanne Nossel, currently executive director of the New York chapter, will oversee the new entity along with an expanded board of trustees that will include members from both chapters. Nossel said in a statement that the decision came out of a “shared sense of urgency” about free expression in the U.S. and overseas.

Of three serious finalists, newly opened records reveal. “Greene was supported by the committee’s chairman, Anders Osterling, who called him ‘an accomplished observer whose experience encompasses a global diversity of external environments, and above all the mysterious aspects of the inner world, human conscience, anxiety and nightmares.'” But the two others on the committee disagreed.

Is there evidence that the U.S. president does or ever has read books? The evidence says no. So what’s the next step? “While most problems faced by presidential administrations are incredibly complex, the solution to problems caused by a president who does not read is fairly simple: He ought to start reading. Simple and easy are very different matters, though, and expecting a man who has always preferred chatting and watching television to the printed word to become a reader at 71 would be foolish.”

Owner Marisa Siegel on what the last 12 months have meant for her and the site: “I feel ready to double down on the promise of writing, on the power of sharing stories, and on our ability to build bridges with language and knock down walls with words.”

In 2014, calls started to spike for more diverse books. And publishing houses and writers responded – with white writers writing more books about people of color. Dhonielle Clayton, who co-founded We Need Diverse Books and the Cake Literary Agency and who has a book of her own coming out in February, says the freak-out about sensitivity readers should really be focused there: “The fact is that sensitivity reading is a band-aid over a hemorrhaging problem in our industry. That’s what we should really be talking about — that’s what real censorship looks like. The systematic erasure and blockage of people of color from the publishing industry.”

Machado’s debut book, Her Body and Other Parties was a finalist for the National Book Award, and she was interviewed by the Paris Review about it as well. So of course The Guardian asks her about writing sex. “What’s the secret?” the paper asks. The reply: “Letting some sex scenes be pleasurable, letting bodies be real.”

The codex was written between 400 and 600 AD, in southern Egypt. “The charred codex was purchased by the Morgan Library in 1962. But no one has opened it for fear of destroying it: The brittle pages have been fused together by a cinder that sank through much of the book, congealing the parchment fibers. Unlike famous codices that have their own names, like the Codex Sinaiticus, this one is known humbly as M.910.”