Category: words

“Today we are less troubled by the homogenizing effects of entertainment than by our deep partisan divisions in both politics and art. And the cultural shift that today’s literary writers struggle to parse is not the impact of TV sitcoms, but of social media and the internet. Even the notion of escape means something very different in the age of Trump than it meant during the Clinton years. In response, some of these writers have shifted their narratives into a safer, more myth-friendly past; others continue to deliver the hopeful feelings of a simpler time.”

“Paying attention is the only thing that guarantees insight. It is the only real weapon we have against power, too. You can’t fight things you can’t actually see. The power a writer has is the power to make things visible, and they are the things that we don’t typically look at or think about. Telling a story about someone has enormous power. People forget a headline. They remember a story.”

“The case of the dairy-truck drivers’ comma has got several things going for it. It’s got David and Goliath in the story of the little guy sticking it to a corporate boss. It’s got men driving around in trucks with copies of Strunk & White in the glove compartment. And you know what else it’s got? Of course you do. It’s got milk. For all the backlash against the dairy industry—the ascendance of soy milk, almond milk, hemp milk (note the asyndeton), none of which, by the way, are really milk, because you can’t milk a hazelnut—there is something imperishably wholesome about cows and milk.”

If there were a comma after “shipment,” it might have been clear that the law exempted the distribution of perishable foods. But the appeals court on Monday sided with the drivers, saying the absence of a comma produced enough uncertainty to rule in their favor. It reversed a lower court decision. In other words: Oxford comma defenders won this round.

The story of the book is intense and exciting and horrifying and electric – and the work itself “is the debut of North Korea’s Solzhenitsyn,” said one human rights activist. The author’s identity can never be known, and his handwriting can’t be photographed to keep North Korean officials from identifying him.

Édouard Louis, author of the smashing bestseller “The End of Eddy,” says he’s furious at the left-wing, and he demands that they do better: “When I see my father voting for Le Pen, I am revolted by the current government and its failings. Of course, I’m revolted by the right, but I never expected the right to do anything for the lower classes, but the left … the left has stopped speaking about poverty, misery and exclusion.”

Books are part of the resistance to any repressive regime. “How many times, and in ways that did not seem to require my consent, have I suddenly and in my own bed found myself to be Russian or French or Japanese? How many times have I been a peasant or an aristocrat? How many times have I been a woman? I have been free and without liberty, gay, disabled, old, loved and loathed.”

An essay in “Tin House” from a few weeks ago opened the floodgates. But still, no names are out there. For instance: “A former visiting professor was still the stuff of legend for, in the words of one woman, ‘trying to fuck everyone.’ Years later, that man had a regular NPR slot and every time I heard his voice I thought, ‘The guy who tried to fuck everyone is telling America what books to read.'”

But the numbers for print books are not due to e-books gaining or waning in popularity. Instead, they’re due to events beyond booksellers’ control – like Brexit, the U.S. election (and its result), and, in Ireland, the popularity of 2016 titles marking 100 years since the Easter Rising.

Yes, it’s time to move beyond James Joyce and Samuel Beckett (and even beyond Emma Donoghue and Tana French).