Category: words

“The accusation that ‘society tends to favor privileged voices’ is, according to some, not only a political analysis but an economic one. “The fear,” one literary agent told me, “is that if a publisher takes on a book written by a successful white male writer about a disabled Native American lesbian, a real disabled Native American lesbian might have trouble placing a book about the same subject at the same house; the publisher already has one.” What this suggests is that books are being categorized—and judged—less on their literary merits than on the identity of their authors. This is particularly true with young adult fiction, whose readers are presumed to be more readily influenced by what they read.”

The ‘own voices’ policy conveys to reviewers that their primary job is not to assess a book’s storytelling, but to rate its adherence to a left-wing catechism (the fairness of whose tenets is presumably self-evident), to identify authorial heretics, and to stick the apostates’ heads on spikes along the digital public highway. Reviewing for Kirkus is now a cross between penning literary criticism and joining a shooting party, a sufficiently athletic undertaking that it really should pay better.

“Good libraries hold several millions of books: even if we read a book a day, we would read only 365 a year, around 3,600 in ten years, and between the ages of ten and eighty we’ll have read only 25,200. A trifle. On the other hand, any Italian who’s had a good secondary education knows perfectly well that they can participate in a discussion, let’s say, on Matteo Bandello, Francesco Guicciardini, Matteo Boiardo, on the tragedies of Vittorio Alfieri, or on Ippolito Nievo’s Confessions of an Italian, knowing only the name and something about the critical context, but without ever having read a word.”

Well, audiobook technology now has you covered. Audible now offers binge-romance listeners “the option to jump to certain places in select audiobooks based on 10 categories.” Ahem.

Good book news for New Jersey and the four or five other places the store will open in the next two years? Maybe. “The chain also continues to roll out a new bookstore concept which it introduced in 2016. The new concept re-positions the chain’s larger locations as ‘cultural department stores’ and places an equal emphasis on the sale of non-book items, as well as books.”

“Sounds a lot, but it would turn out to be a brief history. Universal literacy isn’t that old. Nor is the luxury of sleeping alone. Couldn’t have been much fun when there were five of you on a mattress, one guffawing over Smollett while another was calling hysterically for Heathcliff and the candle was going out.” And the other bookend would be another gift of modernity: television, and streaming.

Amanda Gorman, now 19, was inspired a few years ago by hearing a speech by Malala Yousafzai. What’s she doing now, aside from attending Harvard? “Between courses in sociology and her laureate obligations, she continues to lead One Pen One Page, an organization she founded in 2016 that provides platforms ‘for student storytellers to change the world.’ She is also putting the final touches on She the People, an experiential virtual reality project that seeks to empower teenager girls.”

Celeste Ng, author of the wildly bestselling novel Little Fires Everywhere, says that most people in the U.S. now understand race differently than they did in the 1990s, which makes that decade a great setting for her book. “The decade was, in general, one of optimism; it was ‘placid … a little self-satisfied.'”

How did new MacArthur “genius grant” winner Viet Thanh Nguyen get where he is now? “A mere 18 months ago, Nguyen was still unknown as a fiction writer. His career began quickly, and seemingly out of nowhere, in April 2015 — when a rave on the cover of The New York Times Book Review made his debut novel, The Sympathizer, one of the year’s most-discussed books.”

In one seminar at The University of Texas at El Paso’s MFA program, where at least 12 of the 20 students are native Spanish speakers, “Many of the students around the table comment in Spanish, sometimes switching languages to highlight a point for the native English speakers. Ms. Cote-Botero hangs back, periodically interjecting in either language. A student from Mexico City consults another from Las Vegas on a passage in Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby, occasionally glancing at Google Translate on a laptop.”