Category: words

Noëlle Santos has lived in the Bronx her entire life, and she sees the development wave coming. Now, “Santos is working to open the borough’s newest bookstore, which will also be its only one. She’s calling it Lit Bar, because it will serve wine and, she hopes, be lit as hell.”

Alexie: “What I’m realizing now … is that the writing of the book was just the first half of the ceremony. Now I’m entering into the second half of the ceremony, bringing it to the public, starting to talk about my mother.”

“Many writers of historical fiction feel drawn to the untold tale. They want to give a voice to those who have been silenced. Fiction can do that, because it concentrates on what is not on the record. But we must be careful when we speak for others… If we write about the victims of history, are we reinforcing their status by detailing it? Or shall we rework history so victims are the winners?”

“[Professionals at] the central bank analysed the children’s author after finding that just one in five people could read and understand its inflation report.” Said a former deputy governor there, “Dr. Seuss was a master at using simple language, at getting children to read.”

“Why? While most books can survive centuries or even millennia, Tunglið – as its two employees tell me – ‘uses all the energy of publishing to fully charge a few hours instead of spreading it out over centuries … For one glorious evening, the book and its author are fully alive. And then, the morning after, everyone can get on with their lives.'”

“It is reminiscent of an airport bookshop: big enough to be enticing from the outside but extremely limited once you’re inside.”

“A top priority of the Baltimore Office of Promotion & The Arts is to listen to our constituents, and after hearing from a cross-section of opinions on having Rachel Dolezal participate in this year’s festival, we had to consider how her appearance may affect both the audience and the other extraordinary authors we have planned for the Baltimore Book Festival. For that reason, we believe it would be appropriate to remove Ms. Dolezal from the festival line up.”

In mid-May, the respected culture journal announced, with no explanation, that the entire board of directors and senior staff, as well as half a dozen other staffers, were leaving the following week. Since then, Rail co-founder Phong Bui has reclaimed his former title of Publisher and said that he has hired new staff and plans to double the pay for freelance reviewers by the end of this year. As for his former colleagues, Bui says, “I think people agree that stepping down is the way to let me rebuild the Rail the way I see it.”

“It’s hard to spend an hour in this antiseptic and bewildering store, as I did last week, and see it as an existential threat to anything. At best, it’s a bland attempt at brick-and-mortar retail. At worst, it reflects a company that’s grown so large—and so insanely profitable—that it doesn’t know what to do with itself.”

“The soaring number of new ebooks published in the Spanish markets (more than 50,000 in 2016), the growing importance of digital reading in the region, and the increasing role of the Internet as a distribution and marketing tool for print books, as well as ebooks and audiobooks, all lead to the assumption that the rapid evolution of the digital market will be reality in most Latin American countries by 2020.”