Category: words

“Naomi Alderman’s The Power, … set in a dystopian future where women and girls can kill men with a single touch, was the favourite on a shortlist that included former winner Linda Grant and Man Booker-shortlisted Madeleine Thien.”

“If the argument for globalism is so water-tight and damn-near irreproachable, why in the area of literature does one find so many supposedly progressive voices constantly bashing the very books that come out of the cauldron of heterogeneity? Why, in other words, are those from the intellectual class so quick to assume the mantle of the God of Genesis, impugning works that should be celebrated for either depicting or inhabiting the qualities of our modern world?”

“Richard Brautigan’s first novel sold less than 800 copies. His next novel sold 4 million copies. Trout Fishing in America turns 50 this year, and while most novels of that age now seem dated, Brautigan’s work seems particularly so: playful, goofy, fragmentary, optimistic. Trout Fishing in America is worth revisiting for exactly its status as an artifact of that time, a book that reveled in language, and made its writer into an imperfect legend.”

“Roy became the first Indian woman to win the prestigious Booker Prize with her 1997 work, which sold around 8m copies and turned the young author into a star of the literary world.”

“The Lee estate approached the publisher with the idea of a graphic novel. It is just the latest in a series of projects using Lee’s groundbreaking book since her death in February 2016.”

“Natalia Sharina was arrested in 2015 after a search of her Library of Ukrainian Literature found what officials described as anti-Russian propaganda. She denied the charges” and claimed that the books were planted by police. After spending 20 months under house arrest, she was convicted of inciting ethnic hatred and embezzling public funds; she was given a four-year suspended sentence.

“We live in a world where occupations that once seemed reliably perennial, like clerking in a retail store, are suddenly teetering on the brink of extinction. For novelists, whose work typically takes at least a year (and often much longer) to produce, delivering an up-to-date depiction of contemporary life must be a maddeningly elusive goal.”

“The journal, which once published works by literary giants like Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, T. S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Cormac McCarthy and Wallace Stevens, was nearly moribund. When [novelist Adam] Ross was approached to apply for the position, the review had just a few hundred subscribers, and virtually no web presence. Its plain blue cover hadn’t changed since 1944. Reviving it seemed daunting.”

Only about 8 percent of current literary journals pay anything like a professional wage to their contributors (and slightly more pay their staff, but that’s a different question). So maybe “the whole enterprise of writing literary fiction is a complete waste of your time”? It’s a valid question.

Award-winning author Deepak Unnikrishnan: “When you grow up in Abu Dhabi, you’re trained by your folks to detach yourself from the place, but then you return to it periodically — not physically but mentally — and then sometimes you do so physically as well, and everything evolves, the city evolves, people evolve, your parents evolve, you evolve, and you can’t get a handle on it simply because you don’t know what to talk about.”