Category: words

For instance: “You know those scented, ‘personal’ travel candles that are supposed to set the mood, calm your mind, and give you double points on your AmEx? Take one with you to the church in Rome so you don’t have to rationalize and/or feel bad if you can’t buy one.”

Booksellers say romance’s mostly female readers are reaching out, sometimes in despair or exhaustion, looking for what they might call a safe space for women. And then there’s this: “Interest in politically minded heroes and heroines is on the rise and we expect to see an entire wave of books featuring characters who are fighting back and resisting in their communities.”

“The French writer Marcel Proust paid for glowing reviews of the first volume of his Remembrance of Things Past to be put into newspapers, letters by the great author reveal. The novelist wrote the notices himself and sent them to be typed up by his publisher ‘so there is no trace of my handwriting’ to distance himself ‘absolutely from the money that will change hands’.”

“A Rocklin school board voted unanimously late Monday night to retain the policies that allowed a book about a transgender child to be read in kindergarten, but adopted a provision to forewarn parents of potentially controversial subject matter. The vote followed months of controversy that erupted over the book” – which was brought in by a transgender child – “being read at a Rocklin charter school’s story time.”

The six-volume-plus-online-updates Dictionary of American Regional English, the only project of its type based on in-person field research, was supported largely by grants from the likes of the NEH and the National Science Foundation. “The institutional donors pretty much felt that they did their job to get the dictionary to ‘Z.’ The publicity from the completion of the main text led to an influx of enough money to finish Volume VI, which included maps and indices, but that was it. In the last few years, the staff applied for additional grants to update and add new entries; these failed to materialize.” Jesse Sheidlower offers a eulogy.

The 16,000-word, 19-page (single-spaced!) letter that Neal Cassady sent to Jack Kerouac in 1950 – and which, as reporter Jennifer Schuessler puts it, was “(allegedly) dropped off a houseboat, misfiled at a small Bay Area publisher, nearly tossed out with the trash, and then fought over by two literary estates’ – has ended up in Emory University Library’s Beat collection.

“Some things will always remain the same – some books will always be challenged, and libraries and schools will always fight to keep books available and preserve peoples’ freedom to read. But this year’s Banned Books Week features a striking new trend: Half of the top 10 challenged books of 2016 were illustrated narratives, more than ever before. And this year, the main reason for objection to books was sex and gender issues.”

“Traditionally, US design tended towards literal interpretation, driven… by the complexity of the US market: the image that motivates readers in southern California to pick up a copy of a book is likely to be different to what appeals to readers in South Carolina. As a result, US jackets have tended to appeal to the lowest common denominator, and that does not make for good design.”

Academic institutions are now the biggest steward of poets, who teach everything from freshmen composition courses to graduate workshops. While the financial viability of this arrangement for writers seems to be waning, as universities and colleges find it easier and cheaper to exploit the labor of academics, it is still the uncomfortable status quo.