Category: words

“Canada’s literary community punches above its weight. Its achievements are notable, but its numbers are relatively small. People tend to know one another – from school, teaching gigs, the writers’ festival circuit. All of this has now ruptured. Some long, meaningful friendships have dissolved. The program Galloway once led has ugly scars and deep divisions. Some very good people have left, or are leaving.”

“It’s easy to assume that people are reading less because of the myriad options they have to choose from. But is that really the case? What if we redefined what it means to read, as well as what constitutes literature?”

Basically, yikes: “If a student asks about the point of it all, I ask him why no one else seems to have the same concern. I get louder. I get meaner. I give students points for alerting me to the sources of dissent. Eager to shore up their grades, gleeful at the chance to tweak friends and possibly enemies, a few students furtively hand over notes after classes.”

The prize is a thousand pounds, and British publishers have barely been able to scrape together 50 entries with the deadline two weeks away. “We’ve got loads of stuff from tiny publishers, really tiny ones. But where are the big ones? The fact is that they’re not publishing.”

When an informer turned in a package from the spy, the FBI realized that his misspellings were the key – and there weren’t that many people this could be.

Wow, this is really pretty great: According to Germany’s foreign minister, the house will “be developed into a cultural center for debate over major trans-Atlantic issues, including migration, exile and integration. The house would also offer residency fellowships for artists and intellectuals.”

Start with Laila Lalami, and keep moving on from there to a wide variety of genres and topics. “It’s a small way to understand and empathize with a group of your fellow Americans who desperately need the understanding and empathy of their countrymen and women.”

“The number of audiobook titles increased by nearly 400 percent between 2011 and 2015. E-books, by comparison, are down in 2016, as are adult hardcovers (i.e., printed books from commercial publishers, not including religious or university press titles). Which prompts the question: Do these statistics herald audio as the preferred reading format of the future?”

Collins Dictionaries’ choice was Brexit. Their Oxonian colleagues didn’t opt for Brexit or for any variation on Trump; what they did choose is all too relevant to both.