Category: words

Follow this: “In the very first episode of Jane the Virgin — the hit show about a young woman who is accidentally artificially inseminated during a routine visit to her gynecologist — viewers learn that Jane wants to be a writer. Over the course of the show, she attends graduate school, obtaining her Master’s degree in creative writing and working with an adviser to hone her manuscript. She gets a job at a publishing company, eventually getting discovered at a reading for emerging writers. In the episode airing on Friday, her book is finally published.”

Ann Patchett thinks she’ll win the Nobel Prize someday. She’s published 30 books – nonfiction, children’s novels, and more. Sherman Alexie says she writes entertaining hyperrealistic literary fiction. And she owns a bookstore. “In a strange way, Louise Erdrich is perhaps our least famous great American writer; she is not reclusive, but she is reticent, and her public appearances give the impression of a carefully controlled performance. But Erdrich has also shared many of her most intimate emotions and experiences, in some form, in her novels.”

There are protests, of course, but the library in New York says there’s no other way to keep going: “The nine works to be sold Tuesday are an assortment of 19th-century creations by artists like Giovanni Boldini and Emilio Sánchez Perrier that the auction house has estimated could bring in a total of as much as $1.2 million. A sale in October by Sotheby’s, of another six paintings from the library, brought the institution more than $300,000. More are scheduled to be sold in 2018, Sotheby’s said.”

“At one minute past midnight on July 19, 1975, my father was hanged. For twenty-seven years, I told no one about it. Then I published a memoir. I have lived with the aftermath of that decision ever since, as does anyone who has published their own story, who has unwrapped what had previously been concealed: the skinned inner self dragged out and, shrinking in the light, placed beneath the bright hot gaze of strangers.”

“The teachers’ objection was not just philosophical; it was philological. The rule, they said in the French version of Slate, was a parvenu (it was enunciated in the 17th century and became widely taught only in the 19th century) and politically motivated (it buttressed French laws that denied women equal rights). … In its place, the teachers suggested using ‘the rule of proximity,’ in which the adjective matches the gender of the noun closest to it, which was common practice for centuries.”

“Opening with a quote from Paul Monet, ‘Grief is a sword, or it is nothing’, [David] France’s book chronicles how the activist community fought to develop the drugs that would turn HIV into a largely treatable condition. … [The book] beat titles including Simon Schama’s Belonging and Christopher de Bellaigue’s The Islamic Enlightenment to win the £30,000 award,” the Baillie Gifford Prize.

“The $317 million plan, approved by the board on Wednesday, will be the largest renovation in the history of the [system’s flagship] building, which opened in 1911. … [The plan] does not dictate any specific future for the most hotly disputed unused historic space in the building: its seven football-field-size floors of stacks, which have been largely empty since 2013.”

“At a glitzy gala in New York City on Wednesday night, four writers emerged with one of the world’s most illustrious literary prizes, the National Book Award: Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing, won for fiction; Masha Gessen’s The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, for nonfiction; Frank Bidart’s Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016, for poetry; and Robin Benway’s Far from the Tree, for young people’s literature.” (includes video of complete ceremony)

“Bibliographical analysis, involving patient collation and comparison of printed texts, and the identification of the distinctive ornaments with which printers enlivened otherwise blank spaces, flourish. They remain the bedrock on which, over the last thirty years or more, a ponderous superstructure of interpretation has been erected. Local and national pride have sustained enquiries: a specific town or state is shown to have been in the vanguard of printing and book production; their products exhibit superlative skills in the quality of paper and type-faces, layout, design and binding; the titles are marked by intellectual precociousness or boldness.”