Category: words

In a Q&A with the author, a New York Times journalist gets to ask her many questions about the process of watching her book turn into TV. Ferrante: “No real person will ever match the image that I or a reader have in our minds. This is because the written word, of course, defines but by nature leaves much to reader’s imagination. The visual image instead shrinks those margins. It is destined to always leave out something that the words inspire — something that always matters.”

He’s a poet, and he has to string together residencies and gigs like any poet: “The winner, a poet named Brian Sonia-Wallace, has also won a highly publicized Amtrak residency. And a closer inspection of his resume revealed he had also been an artist-in-residence for the city of Los Angeles and had held similar gigs with the National Park Service and even Dollar Shave Club.”

“A private Utah-based corporation that runs the North Central Correctional Complex in Marion, Ohio, has been sued by the nonprofit Human Rights Defense Center for blocking inmates from receiving books on ‘criminal justice policies, legal research, health care issues and other similar topics.'”

Just last month, this memoir of the author’s journey to post-Qaddafi Libya in search of his father won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Now it has received the £20,000 Rathbones Folio Prize – in the first year the honor has been open to both fiction and nonfiction.

The municipality of metro Istanbul closed 1453 Culture and Art Magazine and fired three editors for “bounderish, disrespectful and provocative content” – that content being a spray-painted “Erdo-gone! Inshallah mashallah (God willing)” on a wall behind a cat. The offending article? A cover story on a popular documentary about the city’s street cats.

“Longer on gadgetry than on literature, AWM is all about the breezy quote and the glitzy busywork toys that are now the currency of the exhibit industry: push a button, spin a wheel, drag an icon, and the gadgets spit out a thimbleful of data. It’s American Lit 101 (and more), the nutshell version. The books? Look up when you first walk in: a lot of them are stapled to a framework hanging just below the ceiling.”

“Fifty years after the book’s publication, it may be tempting to believe its success was as inevitable as the fate of the Buendía family at the story’s center.” It wasn’t – it had many detractors in its first years, including some who dismissed it as traditionalist and anachronistic.

Columnist Mike Newall: “I visited the century-old library that sits atop Needle Park in Kensington because I’d heard its staff was the first in the city to learn how to administer the lifesaving overdose antidote Narcan.”

Amazon Charts might open up a whole new set of bestsellers based on books actually read rather than books bought as coffee-table status symbols. But will this carry more weight with the publishing industry – and readers – than the venerable New York Times bestseller tag, which has been the go-to example of bragging rights since 1931?