Category: words

“Prior to my book I had, at least in some small measure, learned how to generate ideas by myself. But there was always the instant feedback of the audience to tell me where I’d misstepped, and I’ve never created a show without a co-creator, because it’s how I (and my co-creators) like to work. So the book was a new animal.”

A journalist meets the 2015 Nobel Prize winner at the Louisiana Literature festival: “She was reluctant, when asked, to describe the evolution of her style. (‘Must I explain everything?’) … ‘When I walk my dog in Minsk, I go past a church,’ she told the festival audience, ‘I see the youth with their new cars. The priest comes out to see them. They want their cars to be blessed.’ This is how she prefers to answer questions – through details. … When the interview ended, after forty minutes, I figured Alexievich had had enough. … Back in New York, a few weeks later, I read the transcript: The translator, mindful of Alexievich’s schedule, had suggested we end the interview much earlier than we had. Alexievich declined and started to ask me questions.”

After the notoriously publicity-shy author died in 2010, it was reported that, over all the years since his last published work (a 1965 short story), he never stopped writing. Indeed, a 2013 documentary alleged that Salinger had left detailed instructions about publishing some of those writings posthumously. Asked about this by a reporter, son Matthew Salinger replied, “Yeah, what came of those?” So the reporter checked in with the documentarian.

“A group of academics at the University of Cambridge is considering how to implement a call from undergraduates to ‘decolonise’ its English literature syllabus by taking in more black and minority ethnic writers, and bringing post-colonial thought to its existing curriculum. The debate is being followed closely by other universities.”

“The right cover is like a beautiful coat, elegant and warm, wrapping my words as they travel through the world, on their way to keep an appointment with my readers. The wrong cover is cumbersome, suffocating. Or it is like a too-light sweater: inadequate.” Ernest Hemingway was less diplomatic in his response to the heraldic figure composition on the jacket for A Farewell to Arms, designed by Cleonike (“Cleon”) Damianakes in 1929: “I cannot admire the awful legs on that woman or the gigantic belly muscles [on the man],” he wrote to his editor.

“Leon Wieseltier, a prominent editor at The New Republic for three decades who was preparing to unveil a new magazine next week, apologized on Tuesday for ‘offenses against some of my colleagues in the past’ after several women accused him of sexual harassment and inappropriate advances. As those allegations came to light, Laurene Powell Jobs, a leading philanthropist whose for-profit organization, Emerson Collective, was backing Mr. Wieseltier’s endeavor, decided to pull the plug on it.”

Laura Miller: “The ‘personal essays’ that have proliferated across the internet on topics ranging from freakish hygiene gaffes to incestuous relationships are often not really essays at all, but short memoirs, confessional narratives whose chief interest lies in the unusually awful or awfully unusual stories they tell, and only secondarily in how those stories are told. … It doesn’t have to be this way! In its less sensational (and, let’s face it, less profitable) form, the essay collection presents its reader with the opportunity to hitch herself to an original mind as it pursues a course plotted by its own idiosyncratic, free-range curiosity.” (For example, David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, Cynthia Ozick, Francis Spufford.)

“They initially thought kids playing pranks were to blame, but later discovered it was the city’s rough sleepers who were actually stashing the books so they could return the next day to continue reading.”

In doing so, Kirkus, one of the country’s most prolific book reviews, has somehow managed to misapprehend both the nature of reviewing and the nature of books. As I’ve written in this magazine, criticism exists in different flavors, but its defining feature is an individualism of response. That response can be wise or unwise, popular or unpopular. A reviewer can squander authority by seeming too often at odds with good judgment. But, without critical autonomy, the enterprise falls apart.