Category: words

“With the historic complacency of having the leading world language for a mother tongue, we lag behind many other countries in translating. But numbers are not the only indicator. The ways English expression is changing reflect the flourishing throng of writers using it who are in one way or another not from England. This isn’t the start of something, but a development: there has been a marvellous chorale of voices from five continents for decades. New Englishes are instruments to make a new music.”

“Kundera, now 88 years old, left Communist Czechoslovakia in 1975 after he was dismissed from his teaching position and had seen his books banned. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting was published in French in 1979. Two years later it was released in Czech by a Canadian publisher – but it has never actually been published in Kundera’s homeland. It is reportedly hard even today to obtain in the Czech Republic.” That, at last, is about to change.

“Although less well known in Europe, Hamilton achieved such popularity in the United States that, when I tell people that I study Classics, most people over the age of fifty who are familiar with the subject tell me that Hamilton was their entry point.” Now that her The Grrek Way (1930) and The Roman Way (1932) are being republished, Donna Zuckerberg considers how Hamilton’s view of the ancient world has, and hasn’t, held up over the decades.

“At Vanity Fair and then at The New Yorker, she expanded readerships. Her editorial appetites were fierce; she raked in news and new writers and cash. Some people found her style unsettling, and her victories did little to alter that judgment. Brown’s legacy remains controversial not because her success is in question but because, for some, too much was lost in her kind of success.”

As anyone who’s studied French knows, there’s no neuter: every noun and adjective is either masculine or feminine, most words for occupations have different forms for men and women, and if there are both, “the masculine prevails over the feminine” (as the rule has it). Now a group of teachers and a publishing house grammar guide are arguing for an end to this rule and its corollaries. Naturally, the Académie Française is not having it.

“Ramparts was by no means a hippie magazine, but its rebellious spirit, flair for publicity and professional design would all leave their mark on Wenner and Gleason’s fledgling magazine.”

Jacques Pauw’s The President’s Keepers, an account of corruption, coercion and violence at the heart of Jacob Zuma’s administration, has become the fastest-selling book in South Africa since Nielsen began tracking sales there – thanks in no small part to the government’s Streisand-Effect attempts to suppress the book. Now the country’s State Security Agency has reportedly filed criminal complaints against Pauw for “unlawful publication of classified information.”

Now, we’re all going to reread literally every Dickens novel, not to mention J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books and, of course, Mary Poppins: “In addition to a vast array of sexual clues and cues, John Bowen has found Dickensian brollies masquerading as ‘weapons and shields . . . birds, cabbages and leaves.’ And whether they’re in the right place or the wrong place (like the umbrella in Quilp’s eulogy), there is some intangible but undeniable facet of umbrellaness that has captured the human imagination for centuries.”

Jennifer Tseng, whose The Passion of Woo and Isolde just won a poetry prize, on the urgency of writing under the current U.S. president: “This is an ongoing dilemma for me as a writer. How can I take pleasure in the beauty of language without obscuring meaning; can I allow myself to be dazzled by words without losing consciousness? How do I cultivate ambiguity and possibility without endorsing neutrality? Can I let my work be led by complexity without losing sight of simple, urgent messages?”

Jones is currently the editorial director of the books department at The New York Times and has worked at Time and The Paris Review as well. “Her deep familiarity with celebrity, journalism, art and publishing were probably big draws for Condé Nast, whose editors are often expected to mingle among influential people in the disparate spheres covered by their publications.”