Category: words

“The Nobel Prizes are always shrouded in secrecy, the prize for literature, which will be announced tomorrow morning, no less than the rest. But we do know something about the process.”

“For over a decade [from 1990], Bombay Dost challenged social taboo by helping readers come out and come into their own. Fulfilling that mission wasn’t easy, and the magazine briefly shut down in 2002 due to logistical difficulties. When it returned in 2009, Indian law had briefly become more hospitable to gay people. Today, however, Bombay Dost faces a new challenge: As it competes with online publications, the magazine must make the case for the print product, and its persevering power to bring the LGBT community closer together.”

“Today, few people are likely to remember James Lackington (1746-1815) and his once-famous London bookshop, The Temple of the Muses, but if, as a customer, you’ve ever bought a remaindered book at deep discount, or wandered thoughtfully through the over-stocked shelves of a cavernous bookstore, or spent an afternoon lounging in the reading area of a bookshop (without buying anything!) then you’ve already experienced some of the ways that Lackington revolutionized bookselling in the late 18th century.”

“He is the first American to win since the novelist Toni Morrison, in 1993. The announcement, in Stockholm, came as something of a surprise. Although Mr. Dylan, 75, has been mentioned often as having an outside shot at the prize, his work does not fit into the traditional literary canons of novels, poetry and short stories that the prize has traditionally recognized.”

“Linguists instinctively decry the loss of language much as conservationist biologists once mourned the loss of every single species. But conservation is in the midst of a paradigm shift, moving towards acceptance that not all species can be saved, that invasive species are not always bad and that human-engineered ecosystems are not necessarily inferior to natural ones.”

Ariel Dorfman: “Of the myriad times since adolescence that I have returned to the story of Don Quixote de la Mancha, there is one I choose to remember – that I cannot help but remember – as we commemorate the 400th anniversary of the death of Miguel de Cervantes. That reading, in October 1973, took place among a distraught group of captive men and women who, like me, had sought asylum in the Argentine Embassy in Santiago, Chile, after the coup that overthrew the democratic government of Salvador Allende.”

“While the Nobel committee has yet to set a date for any announcement for a literature prize this year (they’ve skipped a few years previously), it does seem unlikely that phones will ring in the homes of Joyce Carol Oates, Don DeLillo, or any other U.S. author.”

“With the publication this month of Today Will Be Different, Maria Semple’s follow-up to Where’d You Go, Bernadette, we got to wondering: What’s the funniest book by a living writer? Well, who better to ask than Maria Semple? The Seattle-based novelist told us her three favorite funny books, so then we asked those three authors. Then we kept asking.”

“For me it is a real problem when we don’t reflect the society we live in. It’s not good for books, or culture, or commercially. We are going to become irrelevant. We know we have a real issue, and we have been slow. We have to address it.”