Category: words

“Started in 1999 by then-computer science student Aaron Peckham, the crowd-sourced online dictionary that The New York Times calls the ‘lexicon of instant argot’ has grown over the past two decades into an internet behemoth.” Problem is, the definitions are submitted by ordinary users. In other words, as Clio Chang argues, “it is a pure product of the internet hordes” – and the hordes have contributed some very ugly stuff to the site, stuff that Peckham seems uninterested in policing.

“While bitter experience has shown poetry exactly where it stands in the marketplace, and the novel has shrugged off multiple reports of its death and maintained pre-eminence, the short story is continually characterised as the neglected form that will be great again. The funny thing is, when you explore its history you find the perception of a distant golden age, an undistinguished present and a return to glory has always been around: the short story has a problem with reality.”

The core of Elsevier’s operation is in scientific journals, the weekly or monthly publications in which scientists share their results. Despite the narrow audience, scientific publishing is a remarkably big business. With total global revenues of more than £19bn, it weighs in somewhere between the recording and the film industries in size, but it is far more profitable.

Curtis Dawkins began as writer, earning a Master of Fine Arts degree before he committed his crime. And while his book, “The Graybar Hotel,” has received early praise from writers like Roddy Doyle and Atticus Lish, its release has also raised uncomfortable questions for the publisher as it tries to win over booksellers and critics to rally behind a work by an unknown debut writer — who is also a convicted murderer.

Hollie McNish, Ted Hughes Award winner: “It’s just to get rid of that shame. Like, be ashamed of things that you should be ashamed of, like being horrible to someone, but don’t be ashamed of these natural processes in your body.”

Jason Blum “sees it as another way for the writers and directors he works with to tell a story. ‘We’re trying to be a home for our artists, and be an outlet for them no matter what they want to do: write a book, do a live event, do a television series, make a movie … Having a book division helps me keep books front of mind when we’re talking to people about how to get their stories out into the world.'”

And what a future writer learned about writing: “Words can be used to make an idea more precise, or more vague, to make something clear or to blur its edges. Some writers are good at imagining people who don’t live a life exactly like their own, and others seem incapable.”

Maybe? “Few writers have seen, first-hand, the way Canadian literature is embraced internationally more than Madeleine Thien. She has been travelling, seemingly non-stop, since her Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning Do Not Say We Have Nothing, a novel both global in scope and profoundly Canadian, was published last year. What she’s discovered, she says on the phone from Umbria, Italy, which she was visiting for a music festival organized by the Canadian classical pianist Angela Hewitt – this immediately on the heels of a two-week prepublication tour of Japan – is that Canadian literature is not viewed the same way, but changes from country to country, region to region.”

Alexander Chee interviews Christine Myung-Oak Lee. Lee on what she learned during the release of her memoir, something she’ll use for her book tour with her novel: “Writers have ‘perfect readers’ — the readers who understand exactly what you’ve written, but these are always few. In this way, the MFA workshop is great training ground for book reviews and public reception of one’s work — you learn that not everyone, which includes very intelligent people, will love your work.”