Category: words

“Thomas Hynes’s We’ll All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night, described in a release from the Canada Council as a portrait of a man’s hilarious yet disturbing journey from St. John’s to Vancouver, is the winner of the English fiction category. Richard Harrison’s On Not Losing my Father’s Ashes in the Flood took home the top poetry prize, Hiro Kanagawa’s Indian Arm was the winner under the drama genre and The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State by Graeme Wood was the pick for non-fiction.”

“In the 15th and 16th centuries in Western Europe, the oldest published recipe collections emanated from the palaces of monarchs, princes, and grandes señores. … Gradually, technology broadened cookbooks’ intended audiences … [and,] in time, as new ideas formed about equality, democracy, and social stratification, presenting certain books as best suited for rich or for poor was no longer considered effective marketing, but culinary literature nonetheless has borne class markers for as long as it has existed.”

As literary scholar Grant Shreve argues, themes, characters, and memes from the Bible are everywhere in American culture, even in 2017. (Besides, he says, knowing your Bible might have helped you figure out what the hell was going on in mother!.)

“When associates at Causeway Bay Books in Hong Kong went missing about two years ago – and its scandalous books about mainland Chinese politicians were destroyed not long after – Woo Chih-wai thought he’d lost everything.” Reporter Vivienne Chow recounts how, partly to earn some money back, he republished a very long, very graphic erotic novel from the 1730s titles Preposterous Words.

Among the thousands of wax cylinders in the University of California (UC) Berkeley’s Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology are songs and spoken-word recordings in 78 indigenous languages of California. Some of these languages, recorded between 1900 and 1938, no longer have living speakers. The history on the cylinders is difficult to hear. The objects have deteriorated over the decades, mold eating away at their forms, cracks breaking through the sound.

“The national shift towards e-commerce has triggered the loss of mall anchor stores and a downward spiral in customer counts at Book World stores, reducing sales to a level that will no longer sustain business operations. Book World has stores in Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois, Iowa, North Dakota and Missouri.”

“Collins Dictionary’s lexicographers, who monitor the 4.5bn-word Collins corpus, said that usage of the term had increased by 365% since 2016. The phrase, often capitalised, is frequently a feature of Donald Trump’s rhetoric.” (Can you guess it?)

“I’m modestly encouraged by how many readers nowadays pay attention to voices – Rebecca Solnit, Maggie Nelson, Olivia Laing – you would have to call essayistic. It turns out that readers are still well able to engage with works of nonfiction that address the world urgently and at the same time try to reimagine what this venerable form, the essay, may be capable of doing in artistic terms.”

Here’s the story of the Luneborch Prayer Book, a beautiful 15th-century illuminated manuscript in Low German that went missing from the Peabody Library in Baltimore around 1962 – and that an unknown somebody mailed back in 2012.

“Let’s stop pretending this language reflects ‘research.’ Let the reader decide whether an idea is plausible or implausible by explaining it, not by presenting it as established fact. Let’s have an end to academic artspeak – and while we’re at it, start letting art speak for itself.”