Category: words

“Thinking in essentialist terms, Tolstoy felt that Napoleon failed to destroy Russia because the collective interests of Russian people aligned against him: a majority of people – wittingly or unwittingly – acted to undermine his agenda. Is it possible that we will see a similar alignment of grassroots interests now?”

“The bookseller made a £9.8m pretax profit in the year to 30 April 2016. The previous year is made a £4.5m loss. Bought from HMV by the Russian billionaire Alexander Mamut in 2011 for £53m, Waterstones has shrugged off the rise of ebooks and Amazon to record a 4.3% increase in sales to £409m. Sales growth has continued in the past year, with a 4.7% rise over Christmas.”

“It used to be ‘comic books,’ or ‘cartoons,’ or ‘the funnies’ – silly names for childish entertainments. Now, we say ‘graphic novels,’ with some rolling their eyes at the puffed-up earnestness of the name.” Joel Priddy looks at where the descriptor came from, why there’s a backlash against it, and why “comics” may be the least-bad option.

The great author-illustrator specified in his will that all of his ‘rare edition books’ go to the Rosenbach Museum and Library, part of the Free Library of Philadelphia. But the Sendak Foundation didn’t want to part with them (especially the ones worth millions), and two years of messy court battles ensued. At the end of last year, there was finally a settlement, and the Rosenbach’s share of the trove has now arrived. Peter Dobrin looks at what is (and isn’t) in it.

Her first novel, The God of Small Things, won the Booker Prize; since then she’s become known as an activist and published reams of nonfiction. A few years ago she said, “I’ve always been slightly short with people who say, ‘You haven’t written anything again,’ as if all the nonfiction I’ve written is not writing.” For those people, and the rest of us, the wait will be over this summer.

The RSS (for Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) is a Hindu nationalist group compared by some to the Tea Party and by others to the Ku Klux Klan. The Jaipur Literature Festival is a swanky, high-minded gathering that would consider the RSS both morally repugnant and vulgar. Until this year, that is.

Novelist Siddhartha Deb calls out the event and (especially) its sponsors: “One of India’s largest entertainment companies, Zee is best known for a news channel that serves as the media bludgeon of the Hindu right, its favorite term of abuse, usually flashing in extremely large font, being ‘Deshdrohi,’ or ‘Nation-hater.'”

Few poets write honestly about their economic situation. Indeed, it’s a challenge to find any poet willing to come clean about money: wanting it, enjoying it, needing it, or lacking it—even though this must necessarily be our condition.

The idea of “editorial independence,” like the idea of free speech, is not faulty per se, nor is it necessarily misapplied. But Milo’s’ case reveals the contradictions of any endeavor that speaks in noble tones about the profit motive.

“Reading gives you an opportunity to understand someone else’s perspective, no matter how much you disagree with it. I wish that everyone had the opportunity to try to inhabit someone else’s experiences for a few hours, and literature is a great way to do that. Books are especially useful because the depth of engagement that someone has with a book allows them to really stay with it and to spend some time with that different perspective. I wish I could give all of my friends and family members I have arguments with a book and say ‘read this and tell me what you think!’ They may not end up agreeing with me, but they might understand a bit better where I’m coming from.”