Category: words

Humans, animals, human-animal hybrids, disembodied limbs and other parts, monkeys playing bagpipes, rabbits in a funeral procession, naked bishops – the surprises are nearly endless. What’s more, says a scholar from the University of Glasgow, these drawings, doodles, and offhand notes can tell us a surprising amount about the people who wrote and read these volumes.

Bhilar, a strawberry-farming mountain town of some 5,000 people about 150 miles southeast of Mumbai, has a particularly rich collection of rare books in the Marathi language (as well as works in Hindi and English), and the plan of the Maharashtra state government is to promote literary tourism and host book festivals in Bhilar along the lines of those in the Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye.

“We used to be okay with literary types asserting independent, fortified egos. Poets and novelists were almost expected to be aloof, even anti-social. But today, we’re too savvy to indulge such a romantic myth. The aloof rebel is nothing more than an affectation, we tell ourselves, a pair of Ray-Bans you slip on. When Bob Dylan was slow to acknowledge his Nobel Prize for Literature, many were scandalized. “It’s impolite and arrogant,” huffed a member of the Swedish Academy. What, then, has displaced the idiosyncratic recluse?”

“I finally clued in to how problematic this policy is a couple weeks ago when one of my authors emailed me to inform me that her book was no longer being listed on Amazon—at all—as available from her publisher, in this case SparkPress, one of my company’s two imprints. When you typed in the title of her book, the only listings that came up were from third-party sellers. Amazon’s policy states that “eligible sellers will be able to compete for the buy box,” but in this case, we had been completely wiped off of Amazon as an eligible seller in any capacity, without being notified.”

Since HBO’s Game of Thrones started in 2011, Martin has finished only one more book in the series of novels on which the series is based, and the TV scripts have now outrun the storylines Martin himself created. Fans are not happy: “The internet’s favorite joke since around 2012 has been to yell at Martin whenever he’s found to be doing something other than furiously typing. The animating theory of the joke is that it’s his duty – his imperative – to finish the story he began. Guess what? It’s not.”

“Don’t say less books, say fewer books,” and “Say Billy and I went to the store, not Billy and me went to the store.” This narrow notion of grammar has amounted to a peculiar snobbery: the more obscure and seemingly complex the grammatical rule, the more we tend to assert its importance and to esteem those who have managed to master it.

The research finds fans of science fiction and fantasy, as well as literary fiction, lean toward a more permissive moral style. Romance and mystery readers, in contrast, tend to abide by a more rigid sense of right and wrong.

There’s a perception that the Francophone community is much smaller than the Anglophone community. The fact is that there are more books published in Quebec and Francophone Canada than in the English language [in Canada].

“Amazon, the biggest e-book distributor in Europe, proposed to drop some clauses in its contracts so publishers would not be forced to give it terms as good as those for rivals. Such clauses relate to business models, release dates, catalogs of e-books, features of e-books, promotions, agency prices, agency commissions and wholesale prices.”

Try mysteries, especially police procedurals. “The fiction author has to do what a journalist cannot. The novel isn’t just a work of fiction; it is ‘alternative facts.’ Readers expect novelists to tell them the stories that aren’t printed in newspapers; the ‘real’ saga they’ve heard about on WhatsApp.”