Category: words

“Recently, there has been a backlash against bloggers in general, but the attitude toward book bloggers has seen some bizarre comments surfacing in Facebook groups.”

“Monolingual ghettos are bad for science. In 2004, work on the transfer of H5N1 flu from birds to pigs languished unread in Chinese while critical time was lost. In the study’s sample, only half of Spanish-language papers and a third of those in Japanese even had abstracts in English. Those that did, unsurprisingly, were more likely to be published in prestigious, peer-reviewed journals. But the bird-flu case shows that that hardly includes all the science that matters. Some good scientists still can’t write in English. The solution is not to replace English, but to encourage multilingualism wherever practical, and require it when needed.”

404 Ink believes there is still a market for quality print products – with digital tools playing a vital role in their promotion, funding and distribution. “We love the physical product and we put a lot of work and money into making sure our magazine in particular is an object people immediately see and feel the value in,”

In a Murakami novel, cooking – and eating – means everything. “Cooking meals is more than a signal of independence though, it’s an introspective behavior that provides order to the chaos of the outside world.”

“Given that so many women writers and readers currently feel that, once again, we are fighting for our basic liberties, might a new category of women’s fiction, more overtly feminist than its predecessor, be on its way? Instead of women searching for sex and love with the opposite sex, perhaps the genre might revolve around women simply trying to survive the opposite sex. “

In grad school at Yale, after finding out his mother had died, Tarell Alvin McCraney “wrote the script not in anger, he says, or only in grief or guilt, though he felt both of those emotions. He wrote it in panic.”

You can prepare for the Super Bowl or you can avoid it – these pieces will help you either way.

“Despite ministerial pledges to halt the decimation of library services, the report from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport found that the number of adults who had visited a public library in the 12 months to the end of September 2016 fell to 33.8%, from 48.2% 10 years earlier.”

In a letter to her local paper, she writes, “We call it fiction because it isn’t fact. … The test of a fact is that it simply is so – it has no ‘alternative.’ The sun rises in the east. To pretend the sun can rise in the west is a fiction, to claim that it does so as fact (or ‘alternative fact’) is a lie.”

The Irish author is the first novelist to win the £30,000 prize for best book of the year in Britain twice. The winning book, Days Without End, is the story of two soldiers who fall in love during the American Civil War.