Category: words

“The scandal – with gaping holes in official information and the resulting speculation and innuendo – has devastated the vaunted writing program, which was established more than 50 years ago by Canadian poet Earle Birney and whose graduates include award-winning authors Lynn Coady, Charlotte Gill and Lee Henderson, as well as Madeleine Thien. It has also inflamed Canada’s tight-knit literary community and irrevocably altered many lives. Steven Galloway, who was never charged with a crime, lost not just his job, but his reputation – and all that implies for his publishing career.”

Zadie Smith: “What can an art of words take from the art that needs none? Yet I often think I’ve learned as much from watching dancers as I have from reading. Dance lessons for writers: lessons of position, attitude, rhythm and style, some of them obvious, some indirect.”

“The scandal – with gaping holes in official information and the resulting speculation and innuendo – has devastated the vaunted writing program, which was established more than 50 years ago by Canadian poet Earle Birney and whose graduates include award-winning authors Lynn Coady, Charlotte Gill and Lee Henderson, as well as Ms. Thien. It has also inflamed Canada’s tight-knit literary community and irrevocably altered many lives.”

Fans of Jane Austen have always tut-tutted about Thomas Cadell of Cadell & Davies, who returned the P&P manuscript to Jane’s father with a curt five-word note in 1797. Yet Cadell really doesn’t deserve the ignominy that that one decision has conferred on him. (Hey, we all make mistakes.) He certainly wasn’t anti-woman – quite the opposite, in fact.

“The Nobel Prize is in fact the ultimate example of bad faith: A small group of Swedish critics pretend to be the voice of God, and the public pretends that the Nobel winner is Literature incarnate. All this pretending is the opposite of the true spirit of literature, which lives only in personal encounters between reader and writer. Mr. Dylan may yet accept the prize, but so far, his refusal to accept the authority of the Swedish Academy has been a wonderful demonstration of what real artistic and philosophical freedom looks like.”

The inventor of Esperanto, Ludovik Lazarus Zamenhof, explicitly hoped that his simple, easy-to-learn language would lead to easy communication between nations and peoples – and thus to an end to conflict between. Even that ideal was controversial, and was rejected at Esperanto’s first international congress. And the arguments kept going from there.

Mr. Roth’s library, some 4,000 volumes, is now stored mostly at his house in northwest Connecticut, where it has more or less taken over the premises. A room at the back of the house has been given over to nonfiction. It has library shelves, library lighting — everything except a librarian, Mr. Roth said recently on the phone from his New York apartment.

“What of the white writer who wishes to be artistically engaged but who simultaneously does not want to re-create cultural dominance in her work? Are there complex, nuanced representations by other white people which we might turn toward? I suggest that one answer may lie in the unlikely legacy of a pale, sickly writer from the mid-twentieth century, who smoked and drank herself to death by the age of fifty, and whose own personal turmoil and self-destruction may be at the root of the enormous insights about difference found throughout her work.”