Category: words

“Saunders is the second American in a row to win the Booker prize, after last year’s winner Paul Beatty. Saunders’ win falls four years after eligibility rules were changed to allow writers of any nationality writing in the English language and published in the UK. There has been fierce criticism of the rule change.”

“Some of these books are concise introductions to topics you might later wish to pursue in greater depth: Modern India, say, or Shakespeare’s Tragedies. Others, like Teeth, contain pretty much everything the average layperson would ever want or need to know. All of them, however, take their Very Short commitment seriously. The length of each book is fixed at thirty-five thousand words, or roughly a hundred and twenty pages. … Never mind that the Roman Empire got some four thousand pages from Edward Gibbon, and that was just to chronicle its demise; here it gets the same space as Circadian Rhythms, Folk Music, and Fungi.”

In fact, Homer’s version is literally Wisdom personified – which is to say that it’s Athena, goddess of wisdom, appearing to Telemachus in the form of a man named Mentor. Harvard classicist Gregory Nagy talks to The Atlantic about how Homer’s Mentor is still relevant today.

“The skills you learn in the humanities are exactly the skills you use in a job search. The humanities teach students to understand the different rules and expectations that govern different genres, to examine social cues and rituals, to think about the audience for and reception of different kinds of communications. In short, they teach students how to apply for the kinds of jobs students will be looking for after college.”

“Part of me fears the parameters that are being placed on writers whose voices have not traditionally been heard, whether it’s to be “authentic” (however we decide to define it), to be representative of their culture or to be the interpreter for a group of readers that’s assumed to be a mainstream/white readership.”

For instance, take the story of St. Louis’ Central Library, which was, for four years, across the street from a large homeless shelter that provided nothing but beds for the night, turning the library into a de facto shelter during the day. “It’s an extremely difficult and complex problem, balancing the safety of the library on the one hand with the acknowledgment on the other that the homeless and marginalized are real patrons, too.”

Why Iraq for a speculative fiction future? Well, it’s obvious: “Baghdad is where algebra, the decimal point, and the first method to calculate the radius of the Earth were invented in ancient times — and Iraq, Blasim feels, is a rightful heir to the sci-fi tradition.”

There’s a list, but first … “In publishing, just as in the movie business, there are men we warn women not to work with, not to be alone with, not to send work to. The burden has always been placed on women to keep each other and ourselves safe—men don’t take accountability for their actions, and why should they? After all, they aren’t held accountable for those same actions (but sometimes their victims are). This is called rape culture.”

And the UK’s The Observer isn’t thrilled with the list: “When Lola Young, as chair, summarised the shortlist as ‘unique and intrepid books that collectively push against the borders of convention,’ she articulated a mission statement for a final session that promises to be an excruciating visit to the third circle of a literary critical inferno.”

The authors of a report on diversity in the genre are the owners of the U.S.’s only romance-focused store, and they love the genre. But the numbers are bad – in some cases, abysmal. They say: “The traditional romance publishing industry is going to collapse if it doesn’t start hiring authors that reflect the current U.S. population.”