Category: words

Workshop officials deny that age is used as a factor in the consideration of any application, according to the university’s emailed responses to Thomson. All applicants, instead, are evaluated based on their writing samples. Dan Thomson, however, maintains that application statistics collected by the university show that, over the past five years, none of the 105 applicants age 51 or older were accepted into the workshop’s fiction program. Nearly half of the 135 fiction students accepted from 2013 to 2017 were between the ages of 18 and 25.

“The use of words without fixed or clear meanings is a major part of what makes academic writing so terrible. People often complain that academic writing is “obscure” or overly convoluted and complex. But there’s nothing inherently wrong with either complexity or obscurity in themselves; research papers in the sciences have to be complex and technical, and introducing people to obscure and unfamiliar words or concepts can be a key part of developing human knowledge. The problem largely comes when words are vague and unclear, admitting of many possible interpretations.”

Sometimes, publishing companies or individuals have had to start their own imprints. For instance: Salaam Reads “takes submissions directly from writers. Zareen Jaffery, the imprint’s executive editor (who is also Muslim), says this practice grew out of feedback she received from Muslim writers, who said it was difficult to find an agent.”

And you can visit Pemberley and Manderley, and you can visit and revist Brideshead should you so desire. (Why does British literature depend so very much on houses?)

Vuong says that it’s far more common to be from a poor background than a middle-class one, but the literary world doesn’t seem to know it. “The fact of the matter is that displacement, immigration and war are some of the most common factors of human history, so I always insist with a little mischievousness that I’m writing something very normal, very common. In fact, perhaps the middle class story is the exotic.”

Noelle Santos, who’s been crowdfunding for the store-to-be: “We need a physical space like a bookstore, whether it be independent or a chain store. It serves this physiological purpose that Amazon cannot reproduce. Amazon is not a bookstore. They are an algorithm, and that’s all.”

“A few decades ago, the advent of the word processor made it easier than ever to revise on the fly; it also made it easy to dwell on one sentence ad infinitum, gilding the lily where once one would’ve advanced to the next thought. The glut of data is another mixed blessing—past a certain point, writers would do better in a state of blissful ignorance.”

“For authors whose books were released in the thick of the political storm, to booksellers watching readers flock to dystopian works, the Trump administration has succeeded in influencing our consideration of books—not necessarily for better or for worse, but in ways that demonstrate how much we need words to survive and provide solace for troubling times ahead.”

“[The memoir,] written by his long-time physician Vejay Ramlakan, discloses intimate details about Mandela’s health and family infighting prior to his death in 2013. … Members of the Mandela family have strongly objected to the book’s publication, slamming it as a breach of doctor-patient confidentiality.”

“Sources familiar with her decision, which comes a year after the Times restructured its books coverage, [said] that last year’s election had triggered a desire to branch out and write more essays about culture and politics in Trump’s America.”