Category: words

“Mr. Guidall is the undisputed king of audiobooks: more than 1,300 so far, with a stack of new prospects beside his bed awaiting his attention. … He’s a bit disdainful of some of his competition in the audiobook world. ‘They’re just reading out loud,’ he said. ‘They don’t have an emotional underpinning. There’s a rhythm to speech in terms of what’s implied. If it’s raining in the book, there’s got to be something about the voice that evokes the rain.'”

“I’ve been asked in interviews, in classrooms and by audiences, if I think fairy tales are feminist. I think they are, but not by our modern definition of feminism. Traditional fairy tales were created long before any such notion existed, and I’d say they help women, rather than lift up women. They warn, rather than extol. They’re useful, which is a much older kind of feminism.”

“Not for them the tabloid gusto of the genre’s doyenne, Ann Rule (“The stalking, predatory animal cuts the weakest from the pack, and then kills at his leisure,” The Stranger Beside Me).They’re more likely to follow the lead of one of the first post-Serial memoirists to wrap a crime story in her own enveloping subjectivity, Amy Butcher, author of 2015’s Visiting Hours: A Memoir of Friendship and Murder.”

Boris Kachka investigates how the notoriously publicity-shy critic worked and what she’s like as a person (no mean feat, that), and he looks at how changes in both the Times approach to her beat and her own interests seem to have led to her decision to take a buyout.

“To us French people, American English has this beautiful casualness about it that translates into the way we picture Americans themselves—a cliché of self-possession and comfortable-in-their-own-shoesness. A jealous French person would say “cockiness.” I for one like this ability Americans have to say big things very casually. I don’t know if it’s just me, but I find that some things in French just have too much weight, and that the American way is enviable. Example: “love” and “amour” are two very different words, even though any English-to-French dictionary will try to convince you they mean exactly the same thing.”

Magazine sales have generally been falling since the day the inventor of the internet said: “Hey, why don’t I invent the internet?” But the latest ABC figures, released this week, show that sales of certain titles are actually going up. News and current affairs magazines are becoming more popular – but celebrity, gossip and fashion publications are still struggling.

Quietly asserting itself in books and personal essays since 2015, the “boredom boom” would seem to be a reaction to the short attention spans bred by our computers and smartphones. The words “boring” and “interesting” didn’t exist in English till the 1800s, a period when…

Yes, Hanya Yanagihara (author of A Little Life) has a fair number of books. And she has some opinions about how to shelve them, too: “Anyone who arranges their books by colour doesn’t truly care what’s in the books.”