“Symptoms included a frenzy for culling and hunting down first editions, rare copies, books of certain sizes or printed on specific paper.”
Category: words
The Ghostwriter’s Dark Arts
“She went from sort of daffy and inattentive to intimately involved with her client’s world. Her head cocked, her timbre lowered, and she understood everything. A client could have sat down and told her they were going to murder their parents and she would have said, “Well, they have been very mean to you.” With her, the clients felt heard. They’d open up their lives, reveal deeply buried trauma. She was a truly fantastic interviewer.”
Publisher And Author Withdraw Children’s-Book Parody After Too Many People Fail To See The Joke
Some of the reaction seems to be Poe’s Law in action (though you’d think the title – Bad Little Children’s Books: KidLit Parodies, Shameless Spoofs, and Offensively Tweaked Covers – would clue folks in), and some seems to be indignant virtue-signaling.
Ralph Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man’ Is About More Than We Thought, As A High School Teacher Learns
Clint Smith: “My classroom was filled with almost exclusively black and brown students, many of them undocumented immigrants. While Ellison wrote of invisibility as a black man caught in the discord of early-twentieth-century racism, this particular group of students read the idea of invisibility not as a metaphor but as a necessity, a way of insuring one’s protection.”
Martin Amis: Within A Generation Literary Culture As We Know It Now Will Be Gone
Zadie Smith said to me years ago, “Everything we think of as literary culture will be gone in a generation and a half.” She said, “It will last your time, but it won’t last mine.” I don’t think it will ever disappear, but it will shrink. It will go back to what it was when I started out, which is a minority interest sphere, which some people happen to be very interested in.
Village Voice Names Third Editor-In-Chief In A Year
Stephen Mooallem, formerly of Harper’s Bazaar and Interview, “said he wanted to improve the paper’s digital side, re-establish its cultural coverage and investigative reporting, and embrace the paper’s inherent ‘New Yorkiness.'”
Erdogan’s Terrible Crackdown On Turkish Journalists And Teachers Has Mostly Left Novelists Untouched
In Turkey since the failed coup, thousands of academics, teachers and journalists have been jailed, and pro-Kurdish books have been pulped. But “only three authors are behind bars, none of them for their books.”
Why Don’t We Have More Famous Black Sci-Fi Writers?
Double problems: The U.S. literary fiction establishment’s problems with genre, and the genre’s racism. “The space for black authors in speculative fiction is continually being built, while the existence of those very spaces is still being challenged by their gatekeepers.”
If Julian Barnes Can Admit He Was Wrong About E.M. Forster, We All Have Hope For Re-evaluating Books (And Writers)
Barnes thought Forster was stuffy and boring, and perhaps a little straitlaced. Then he read an anthology of English food writing. “Where was that fusty, musty, dusty writer I had imagined Forster to be? Nowhere at all.”
A Rant Against Political Correctness
Jonathan Foreman: “If you have had much to do with liberal intelligentsia in the U.S., they like to think they are above their own country, and they often have contempt for their compatriots, and they think they’re better. They think that being super-critical of the United States exempts them. When they talk about Americans, they don’t think they’re talking about themselves. They’re the same people who are always vowing if Bush wins the election, they’re moving to Italy. They never move to Italy.”