So this went over well (read the link for the lengthy backlash): “‘What would Emily Brontë think if she found that the role of chief ‘artist’ and organizer in her celebratory year was a supermodel?’ the biographer, Nick Holland, asked. Mr. Holland said Ms. Cole’s appointment smacked of a desire to be ‘trendy.’ He was quitting the society, he added sarcastically, before it had the chance to announce the comedian James Corden and the singer Rita Ora as future partners.”
Category: words
Has Television Taken Over The Basic Strengths Of The Novel?
“Great television is taking over the space occupied by many novels, and taking with them many excellent writers. And by and large, it’s delivering the same rewards to its audience. But what about novels that exploit the opportunities that are available only to the form of the novel, such as novels that explore interiority, or rely on the novel’s versatile treatment of time and causation? Who will speak for such novels?”
What The Resistance Can Learn From The Campaign To Save The New York Public Library
“In September, with no shortage of Trumpian Goliaths rising up to threaten ever more of the institutions we rely on, we checked back in with a number of the activists whose work [Scott Sherman’s book Patience and Fortitude] documents. How, we asked, does the movement to save the NYPL look with a few years’ hindsight? What lessons might their experiences offer to activists taking stands against the powerful today? The answers we got back amounted to a crash course in effective resistance.”
In Search Of The Mysterious Author Of A Memoir From Inside The Gulag
“How the diary emerged reads like a detective story, with Zoya Eroshok, a prominent Russian journalist, spending years piecing together the identity of its author and her fate. … [The] diary is believed to be the only one written inside the camps to have survived.”
The Ten Most Important Lost Texts From The Ancient World
From an Indian equivalent of Aesop’s fables to the holy scriptures of Zoroastrianism to an early Chinese encyclopedia to Sappho’s poems.
How Reading Has Shaped Who We Are
“Literature, since it emerged 4,000 years ago,” has “shaped the lives of most humans on planet Earth.” We are what we read. ‘The Written World’ makes this grand assertion on the basis of a set of theses. Storytelling is as human as breathing. When fabulation intersected with writing, stories were empowered to propagate themselves in society and around the world as civilization-forming “foundational texts.”
The *Real* Word Of The Year 2017 (And 2018), Like So Many Words, No Longer Means What It’s Meant To
A rather grouchy Louis Menand, after dissing the various dictionaries’ choices and suggesting that, perhaps, the word of the year ought to be a hashtag (#), argues that his choice of the emblematic word of these times is apt precisely because so many words are being deliberately distorted: “‘Fake’ once meant ‘counterfeit’ or ‘inauthentic,’ like a fake Picasso or a fake birth certificate. It is now used to mean ‘I deny your reality.'”
Costa Book Award Winners Include Poet Who Died Last June
Helen Dunmore’s collection Inside the Wave, which took the poetry prize, is about the diagnosis and treatment of the cancer that ended her life at age 64. Other category winners are Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13 (novel), Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine (first novel), Rebecca Stott’s In the Days of Rain (biography), and Katherine Rundell’s The Explorer (children’s literature). Each category winner receives £5,000; the Costa Book of the Year prize, worth £30,000, will be revealed on January 30.
Will Technology Reinvent The Book? Nope, And Here’s Why
“Yes, the written word has been in decline since the advent of film and then television, though recent technological change has undoubtedly hastened its fall. But this has led many to assume that the problem is one of form, that if the book could adapt to our multi-screen age, its cultural retreat would end. This optimistically assumes that the decline is reversible, which it isn’t. Books were overtaken by other media decades ago. The problem isn’t that books don’t have enough television in them, or enough internet in them; it’s that they are just one form of readily available cultural consumption among so many.”
The 100 Greatest Nonfiction Books In English (A Highly Arguable List From The Guardian)
Given in reverse chronological order, from Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction (2014) back to the King James Bible (1611), Robert McCrum’s choices include historical monuments (The Federalist Papers, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman); landmark reference works (Samuel Johnson’s and Noah Webster’s dictionaries, Roget’s first thesaurus); great memoirs (Ben Franklin, Frederick Douglass, Vera Brittain), scientific texts (A Brief History of Time, On the Origin of Species, reportage, polemics; provocative modern choices Barack Obama, Naomi Klein) – and a few WTF titles that’ll make you go, “Wait, that’s not nonfiction!“