Category: words

You thought the Congressman’s books were selling out before? Now it’s won quite a few of the coveted youth awards. But here’s a list of all of the winners and honor books, including the Newbery, the Caldecott, the Printz and so many more, from this morning’s ALA Midwinter gathering in Atlanta.

“Wanting is not enough. I have wanted to climb a fourteener—here in Colorado, this is a peak over 14,000 feet—but I have yet to put in any effort to accomplish it. And unless I start training for a marathon hike, this will remain an unrealized ambition. Drive is the will to achieve. It is a state of mind that propels you to act. In the years before my book came out, I had the drive to write. I made compromises in order to have the time and space to make my art.”

Ottessa Moshfegh: “I think that’s what I’m interested in, this question of whether or not we are allowed to be other people. Are we allowed to change? Do we give ourselves permission to grow? Are we even capable of making those kinds of decisions? Is there a will, or are we just being pushed around by our own personalities, just fucked to be who we are?”

The 44th president cared – a lot – about books. What does that mean now?

A few dozen writers respond to a question from LitHub about what is necessary reading for the next four years. “As Paula Gunn Allen reminds us: ‘The root of oppression is the loss of memory.'”

“Though research has not done much for profanity, the opposite is not true. Neurologists have learned a great deal about the brain from studying how brain-damaged people use swearwords—notably, that they do use them, heavily, even when they have lost all other speech. What this suggests is that profanity is encoded in the brain separately from most other language.”

“The answer may lie with niche-filling shops like Pittsburgh’s new City of Asylum Books, part of a nascent multipurpose cultural center on the city’s North Side called Alphabet City Center. Alphabet City is a consolidated space recently acquired by City of Asylum, a nonprofit arts organization providing sanctuary and forums of expression for exiled writers of all genres from other countries, introducing many unsung voices to the Pittsburgh public through literary community events.”

George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo has 166 different characters, and for the audio version, he wanted to have each on them voiced by a different performer. Amazingly, Penguin Random House agreed – and you should see the astounding cast they’ve assembled. (includes video)

“Compiled by collector Jack V. Lunzer over more than six decades, and stored at his home in London, it became known as the Valmadonna Trust Library” – and it’s been acquired by the National Library of Israel.

“To have one’s novel translated – on one hand, an honor. On the other – you might as well be trying to have sex using another person’s body.” Now imagine that that body used to be yours, and you remember it. Boris Fishman tells the story of reading from the Russian translation of his A Replacement Life at a book tour event in Estonia.