Category: words

“Two things happened to Google Books on the way from moonshot vision to mundane reality. Soon after launch, it quickly fell from the idealistic ether into a legal bog … that finally ended last year, when the US Supreme Court turned down an appeal by the Authors Guild and definitively lifted the legal cloud … But in that time, another change had come over Google Books, one that’s not all that unusual for institutions and people who get caught up in decade-long legal battles: It lost its drive and ambition.”

“We had to pivot and say: What are we going to do with these books that were going to be anti-Hillary? Instead we developed new approaches that talked about the Trump agenda.”

Peter Hessler recounts how the language classes he and his wife took in Cairo in 2011 and ’12 changed, in terms of vocabulary and outlook, because of the Arab Spring.

A year ago, the Israeli novelist Dorit Rabinyan was at the centre of an unexpected storm. Her third book, All the Rivers – about a relationship between a Palestinian artist, Hilmi, and an Israeli woman, Liat – had been selected for the national [school] curriculum. Then, abruptly, it was withdrawn by the education ministry because of its subject matter.”

” ‘Bleaker House’ is as formalistically inventive as any postmodern, genre-subverting work of fiction—which made me wonder, as I was reading it, whether in fact it was a postmodern, genre-subverting work of fiction, and not a memoir at all. Had Stevens invented her stay on Bleaker Island? Had she invented the island itself? Or had she invented the premise that she went there to write a conventional novel, and all along intended to write something that subverted the very idea of a novel?”

When people publish stories about the U.A.E., the country is almost always represented entirely by Dubai, which itself is almost always reduced to a glitzy, two-dimensional backdrop: a suitably strange, foreign Elsewhere, chock-full of easy signifiers of the “very old” (dark-skinned men in robes, desert sand) and the “futuristic” (Lamborghinis, postmodern architecture). It appears most commonly in mysteries and thrillers—the perfect dash of exotic spice to liven up a visitor’s investigation into some globe-spanning conspiracy.

“It can be hard to pin down what makes a personal letter, along with what makes for its individuality and authenticity. Connection is the most basic ‘reassurance that I am not floating out there alone in the universe’, as Nina Sankovitch writes in Signed, Sealed, Delivered. A letter links two particular persons, even when its words are handed round and read to others. And while we’re more connected than ever now, our connections can be less specific – we post a lot of ‘personal’ updates to a varied or unknown audience who has no responsibility to respond.”

Adam Bellow (yes, Saul’s son), after 30 years handling such notorious titles as Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve, Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education and David Brock’s The Real Anita Hill, left the HarperCollins conservative imprint Broadside to launch All Points Books at St. Martin’s Press. However, as Alexandra Alter reports, “Mr. Bellow played a role in widening the ideological divisions he now maintains he wants to bridge … [and his] reputation might make it hard for him to recruit liberal writers to his list.”

“The Miami dialect is not a second-language accent, like you’d hear from a Cuban immigrant whose first language is Spanish. It is an American English dialect … spoken by native-born Americans. Which doesn’t stop the accent from seeming foreign to others: [FIU linguist Phillip] Carter says that his students will sometimes find themselves in a neighboring county, only to be asked what country they’re from.” Dan Nosowitz looks at the ingredients in this sancocho of speech patterns.

“Around half of the population of the UK and Ireland continue to use libraries. Nearly half (46%) of people aged 25 to 34 still visit them according to the study – a rise of 2%.”