Category: words

“When I read the hellfire sermon in A Portrait, I had heard some of those very words, even though I was born 40 years after the book came out. The Christmas dinner scene, with the bitter argument about Parnell between Stephen’s father and his aunt, could easily have come from many Irish tables in the 1970s and ’80s … Since corporal punishment in schools continued until as recently as the early ’80s, anyone who had the misfortune to be educated by priests or Christian Brothers (or indeed nuns) would have fully recognised the scene where Stephen is unfairly punished. It happened to us all.”

“Whether it takes phonics, whole-language learning, all-singing, all-dancing teachers, or the gradual introduction of criminal penalties for illiteracy, something has to change. A national reading push would be the moonshot that makes all others possible. How many more studies will it take? We know that readers vote more and volunteer more, and that reading literature deepens empathy. And — as finally, categorically demonstrated in a landmark Yale study last year — that readers live longer.”

David Galef, who wrote the book on flash fiction, and Len Kuntz, one of the form’s most singular practitioners, have a dialogue about where a genre that can range from a few hundred words to a single sentence is headed.

Milo Yiannopoulos has parlayed his ban from Twitter  — and some controversial appearances on college campuses and cable TV shows — into a $250,000 book deal with Threshold Editions, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, The Hollywood Reporter learned on Thursday.

There’s a huge French bestseller just translated into English, a ferocious and hilarious satire of contemporary El Salvador, Jim Harrison’s final collection of poetry, the history of a New York apartment building through the AIDS crisis, a history of the coyote, and “the most literary book on bodybuilding and superbike racing you’ll ever read!” (There’s also Marina Abramović’s memoir, which we don’t think was exactly overlooked.)

David Denby: “Page by page, the book is less hearty than I remembered … and much funnier – really savage in many passages.”

“In 2016, small publishers like New Directions and Coffee House Press and lauded indie powerhouses like Melville House continue to bring many deserving international voices to the forefront. And in an election year that has many Americans wondering what in the bloody hell is going on around here, books from other parts of the globe can be a welcome treat to help counterbalance the chaos.”

“Bookshops have closed. Publishers have left. Authors have stopped writing. Books have been pulped. Printers are refusing political works. Translators have grown weary of being associated with certain topics. Readers have stopped buying. And the whole industry is wondering if hard-hitting books on Chinese politics still have a future in the former British colony.”

Some authors and publishers are wary. “We have seen it all before. … A few people are championed and then people lose interest because they think the issue has been addressed. And then it all reverts back to the way it was before.”

“Scare quotes (also known, even more colorfully, as ‘shudder quotes’ and ‘sneer quotes’) are identical to standard quotation marks, but do precisely the opposite of what quotation marks are supposed to do: They signal irony, and uncertainty. They suggest words that don’t quite mean what they claim to.”