Category: words

“As a pre-World War II transatlantic creative, he worked in Hollywood and on Broadway. And after World War II – things had gotten pretty hot for him in Britain because of the radio broadcasts he made for the Nazis as a captive in 1941 – he lived in the U.S. until his death. He became an American citizen in 1955.” And this American-ness, argues one scholar, is key to Wodehouse’s continuing appeal.

An anonymous woman in northwestern England purchased an auction lot of old secondhand books for £14. When she finally had time to go through the contents, she found the 1886 edition of the Dostoevsky novel, the first published in English. She has now made a 96,300% profit.

“Librarians spent decades figuring out how to best organize its constantly growing collections, which would render systems dated as their contents reflected new industries, and thus required new vocabularies. Heads butt over how to organize the stacks; casual rivalries even arose between librarians who had different visions.”

The five-time National Magazine Award finalist, which has had contributors ranging from Nick Hornby to Anne Carlson to Lemony Snicket Daniel Handler, had been published by McSweeney’s since it was founded in 2003. The title has been purchased by the Black Mountain Institute at The University of Nevada, Las Vegas and will be edited by the Institute’s executive director, Joshua Wolf Shenk.

“This once-staid outfit — who buys a dictionary anymore? — has earned itself a large and devoted following on social media, and no wonder: Trump is literally being trolled by the dictionary.”

The Moth was founded in 1997 by the writer George Dawes Green — its name comes from his memories of growing up in St. Simons Island, Ga., where neighbors would gather late at night on a friend’s porch to tell stories and drink bourbon as moths flew in through the broken screens and circled the porch light. It has since grown into what its artistic director, Catherine Burns, calls “a modern storytelling movement” that has inspired “tens of thousands of shows worldwide in places as diverse as Tajikistan, Antarctica, and Birmingham, Ala.”

“Slow reading” is not to be understood in opposition to “fast reading.” There is nothing per se problematic with speed- or skim-reading; there are occasions when speed is necessary. Slow reading is often characterized by its intensity: it involves a fine-tuned attention to detail and nuance. And openness: “Slow reading is important precisely because it provides us with the attentive quality necessary for openness to occur.”

Why? Because the superhero world has a huge hole at its center. “Comics creator Jon Proudstar remembers the first time he saw a Native American character in a comic. It was Thunderbird, in the X-Men, and he was quickly killed off. Proudstar was 8 years old and he was not happy. ‘And for years I just lamented about it and said one day I’ll bring him back,’ he says.”

“The line between public and private selves is different for different writers. Some are comfortable sharing many details of their lives. Neil Gaiman tells fans about his book projects, encourages people to get involved in refugee relief and tweets pictures of his wife and baby son. Other writers prefer relative anonymity. Thomas Pynchon famously doesn’t give interviews and is rarely photographed. Most writers probably fall somewhere in between.”

“Susan Benne, executive director of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America, says the organization has about 450 members but estimates 60 percent of those do not have an open storefront, and the overall number of dealers continues to drop. Lost, too, is that dusty aura of something vanished, gone like smoke from steam engines in the American landscape. The digital age of Amazon.com, e-readers and online research has its advantages, but for parishioners of the Church of Old Books, it has also relegated a way of reading, and finding the book of your fever dreams, to a dust-mote-enchanted memory.”