“Below are highlights from Kakutani’s tenure at the Times – her reviews of major novels and autobiographies, her obituaries and appreciations, her profiles and essays. Together they represent a vigorously led life of the mind, a crash course in contemporary literature and a tour through the zeitgeist of the turn of the millennium.”
Category: words
Are Trigger Warnings Censorship (Or A Good Idea?)
If you search for” books with trigger warnings” you will hit an interminable list of titles which include, and are not restricted to, suicide; self-harm; eating disorders; grief; miscarriage; addiction; racism; rape; sexual violence; incest. Where do you draw the line?
Sven Birkerts Found It More And More Difficult To Write. Then The Impulse Returned
“The change did not come overnight, but I did start to notice a while back that I was having fewer of these word surges interrupting whatever I was doing. Less and less often was I waking up wanting to strategize — plotting out paragraph transitions like a traveler marking a route on a map, except that both map and route were both in the head.”
The Strange Tastes Of Bookstore Shoplifters (Kierkegaard And Wittgenstein?)
Sure, thieves make off with expensive coffee-table books and textbooks, but, says the manager of the London Review Bookshop, “Our most-stolen authors, in order, are Baudrillard, Freud, Nietzsche, Graham Greene, Lacan, Camus, and whoever puts together the Wisden [Cricketers’] Almanack.” One booklifter who got caught said as he was escorted from the store, “I hope you’ll consider this in the Žižekian spirit, as a radical reappropriation of knowledge.”
Arundhati Roy Leads This Year’s Booker Man Longlist
On a longlist thronged with literary titans, whose combined trophy cabinet would include the Pulitzer, the Costa, the Baileys, the Folio, the Impac and the Goldsmiths prizes, Roy – the only author to have won the Booker before – is listed for her novel about an Indian transgender woman, which judges called a “rich and vital book”.
A Brief History Of ‘No’
In this Lexicon Valley podcast, “John McWhorter goes negative, exploring the evolution of no and not.”
The Most Anthologized Poems Of The Last 25 Years
A couple of weeks ago, Emily Temple cracked some books, ran some stats, and came up with a list (several, actually) of the most anthologized short stories of all time in the U.S. over the last 34 years. Now she’s tried a similar approach with poetry.
How Poetry Changes Lives (So Let’s Stop Being So Defensive About It)
Louis Menand: “Michael Robbins, Ben Lerner, and Matthew Zapruder all tell pretty much the identical story about themselves. One day, almost inadvertently, they read a poem, and suddenly they knew that they had to become writers. They did, and it changed their lives. Later, they all wrote books about poetry. I read those books, and it changed my life. You read this piece about those books. Maybe it will change your life. If it does, the change will be very, very tiny, but most change comes in increments. Don’t expect too much out of any one thing. For although the world is hard, words matter. Rock beats scissors. It may take a while, but paper beats rock. At least we hope so.”
Here’s An Isaac Bashevis Singer Story, Translated Into English For The Frst Time
In “The Gift of the Mishnah,” as the editors put it, “19th-century Hasidism meets its radical grandchildren in the 20th.”
The Great Essay Is Rarely About What It Says It’s About
The essay, in Brian Dillon’s account, is both erotic and absent, lapidary and profuse, and is at its best when always concerned with its own realisation of its inherent sense of failure. Before this discussion of etymology, though, comes a bravura cadenza of topics, placed to make us realise the essay is never about what it claims to be at all.