Category: words

In the summer of 1953, Christopher Strachey, a colleague of Alan Turing at the University of Manchester computer lab, wrote a program that made the lab’s Ferranti Mark 1 mainframe churn out love letters according to a template (e.g., “you are my [adjective] [noun]“). Beginning eight years ago, artist David Link constructed a model of the old computer and started running Strachey’s software (if that’s the word) once more.

Chief creative officer Cooper Hefner: “Nudity was never the problem because nudity isn’t a problem. Today we’re taking our identity back and reclaiming who we are.”

Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happpen Here is on the list, as is Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. (They didn’t need to include The Handmaid’s Tale.) But there are also titles by Mario Vargas Llosa, James Baldwin, Katie Kitamura, Hari Kunzru, Rachel Kushner, Jean Brunner, Antonio Tabucchi, and Viet Thanh Nguyen.

Police officers raided the Library of Ukrainian Literature in Moscow in October 2015 and arrested its director, Natalia Sharina, for distributing “extremist” literature and “anti-Russian propaganda.” She’s been under house arrest ever since and was put on trial last fall. Now Sharina is appealing to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

“The voices of Oscar Wilde and Dorothy Parker and Benjamin Franklin still feel electrically alive to us because they managed to bake their personas into their brief observations. While proverbs and adages (cousins of the aphorism, to be sure) often lose their authorship and become orphaned—think about how many times someone has mentioned “an old Irish saying” without knowing anything about its actual provenance—aphorisms stay tethered to their creators, dragging their voices along through history.”

The haul may be a bit challenging for them to sell on the open market. They stole 160 rare books, including “a 1566 copy of De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium by Copernicus, worth an estimated £215,000, as well as works by Galileo, Isaac Newton, Leonardo da Vinci and a 1569 edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy.”

Christine Hyung-Oak Lee could only remember 15 minutes at a time. “I couldn’t plan for the future. I couldn’t think of the past. I had no regrets. So it’s literally living in the moment. I was experiencing something that people go to yoga and Zen retreats to achieve. So it was quite pleasant. It was not pleasant for the people around me.”

Fifty years “after Forough Farrokhzad’s sudden death, the reclusive Ebrahim Golestan has finally broken his silence, speaking out about the seriousness of their relationship. … Farrokhzad, one of Iran’s most loved literary figures of the past century who was largely overlooked in the west, was known for her candid writings challenging the patriarchal limits of Iranian society and has been compared to Sylvia Plath.”

Édouard Louis, author of the new book “The End of Eddy,” about growing up gay in a conservative small town: “However different Baldwin’s childhood was from De Beauvoir’s, mine was like neither of theirs: in my childhood, there were no books. My parents have never read a book in their lives; there wasn’t a single book in our house. For us, a book was a kind of assault: it represented a life we would never have, the life of people who pursue an education, who have time to read, who have gone to university and had an easier time of it than us.”

Viet Thanh Nguyen, who won for “The Sympathizer,” says that “Sometimes people have said that I give voice to the voiceless Vietnamese. If you know anything about Vietnamese people, you know they are not voiceless. They are quite loud, whether it is in Vietnamese or English. Here is a reading list of some of the most important writing by Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans, just to prove that we have not been voiceless. Most of the time we are just not heard.”