Category: words

This is the problem: “Every organizational schema is a doomed attempt to blanket chaos with order, and only more so the grander its ambitions. It may be possible to draw a sensible line delineating science from nature, art from design, autobiography from memoir, or war history from American history from Native American history, but to do so is to suggest that any one exists independently from the other. The clear lines bleed and become wobbly.”

Whoa. “The dizzying space contains a grand optical illusion that you only see once you’ve set foot inside. Its lobby is a cavernous tunnel that most notably features striking black mirrored flooring. Together, the reflective ground and curved shelving creates the feeling that you’ve stepped into a perfectly circular room, making you question which way is up.”

Ahmed Naji: “It is interesting working on a novel in prison.”

“For more than 200 years, male British authors (usually poets, usually in pairs) have co-written or co-edited collections, anthologies or scholarly travel journals. It’s a tradition that is in surprisingly rude health, with recent examples and forthcoming festivities marking the 50th anniversary of a collaboration that sold shedloads.”

“[Kate] Coleman works full time at the downtown library as part of a yearslong effort by the Hennepin County Library system to better help the homeless connect with tools and resources in the area.”

“Publishers believe that Russian individuals are behind the creation of an fake book parodying a self-styled manual for resisting US president Donald Trump and other populist leaders, with the author, historian Timothy Snyder, claiming the listing to be the latest attack in a series of efforts by Russians to undermine his work.”

“It would be a cliche to say that indexers are the unsung heroes of the publishing world. But unsung they generally are: no indexer usually expects or receives credit by name in books where everyone from the font designer to the snapper of the author photograph tends to get a solemn shout-out. And heroes they are, too: the index is, in any nonfiction book, more useful than almost anything else in the apparatus. It is a map of the text; a cunningly devised series of magical shortcuts that can in the good case save a scholar many hours of work, and in the bad one save a bookshop-browsing cabinet minister from having to buy a former colleague’s memoirs.”

“Men are wired for combat, to bash the enemy into submission, and it’s hard to wipe the blood and gore off your hands and sit down and write, ‘O wondrous thou, the wonderment of these my happiest days, I lift my pen to praise thy shining beauty’ and so forth. But you can do it. The first step is: Imitate.”

This is one of those questions that becomes more complicated the more you think about it – not to mention the fact that the views of translators, book publishers, and original authors on the matter may vary. Tim Parks, both author and translator, gives the issue a serious look.

“That liberal literati in the US were, and remain, singularly un-shocked by so much that was awful pre-Trump is troubling. Neither historical accuracy nor political realism is well served by harping on ideals that are blatantly at odds with the actual deeds of a country Martin Luther King once called ‘the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.’ In 2017, we retain this distinction, with a military budget roughly the same size as the next seven largest combined.”