Category: words

“[Matt] Cain, the editor of Attitude magazine [a popular gay-male-oriented title in Britain], said the support for his book – which is on course to be the fastest-funded novel on [crowdfunding platform] Unbound – showed there was a market for a commercial novel about a gay man, even though publishers rejected it as ‘too working class, too 80s, too immersed in pop culture, and too gay’.”

“Something funny has happened in Stockholm over the last three years, a period that has coincided with the Swedish academic Sara Danius becoming chair of the Nobel Committee for Literature, replacing Peter Englund. The Nobel has become, well, fun. It opened up the definition of literature to include 2015 laureate Svetlana Alexievich’s oral histories and 2016 laureate Bob Dylan’s off-kilter folk songs. Kazuo Ishiguro, the 2017 laureate, would appear to be a far more conventional choice—his prevailing theme is memory and he has returned on multiple occasions to World War II.”

“In July, a flock of internet detectives discovered the books. The Travels and Adventures of Little Baron Trump and His Wonderful Dog Bulger was published in 1889, and quickly forgotten thereafter, as was its sequel, Baron Trump’s Marvelous Underground Adventure. They are not timeless, and were quickly overshadowed by more compelling contemporary entries in the fanciful-travel-stories-for-children genre, like A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and The Wizard of Oz. Their author, lawyer Ingersoll Lockwood, appears in history mostly for his role in a financial tangle that occurred in the aftermath of an elderly woman’s death on the railroad tracks near Philadelphia.”

Si Newhouse seems to have decided that the New Yorker was worth protecting, and that the way to protect it was to get out of the way. Remnick has written that he was left alone to manage the magazine. If it has become more business-savvy, sponsoring festivals and so on in a way that would have embarrassed Mr. Shawn, none of that seems to have diminished the quality or the integrity of the words on the page (or, as Mr. Shawn never could have imagined, on the screen).

Some things work well – Margaret Atwood’s Hag Seed, Jeannette Winterson’s adaptations to the story of The Winter’s Tale (titled The Gap of Time) – but: “In a 2015 New York Times article detailing the Hogarth Shakespeare project, Alexandra Alter wrote that Winterson’s cover was, ‘a promising start to an ambitious new series from Hogarth, which has assembled an all-star roster of stylistically diverse writers to translate Shakespeare’s timeless plays into prose.’ As the series has gained more traction, it is hard not to notice the word ‘stylistically’ here.”

Children’s literature scholar Philip Nel has published many books about Theodore Seuss Geisel, including August’s Was the Cat in the Hat Black? “He did great anti-racist work … and he did work that was racist,” Nel says. “It was the same person, the same body of work, done at the same time.”

Writers including N.K. Jemisin and Nnedi Okorafor – whose 2010 postapocalyptic Who Fears Death is being turned into a series on HBO – and, earlier, Octavia Butler and Ben Okri, have long been turning to traditions well outside of medieval Europe for their speculative fiction books, but now “there’s an enormous appetite for fantasy stories that feature diverse characters and settings and tackle contemporary social issues.”

You want to read about fighting against despotic leaders who have almost total spy control over their populations, right? Right? Or maybe you just want to read Richard III again. You’ll find all of that here.

Railway books, obviously.