Category: words

“There’s more than a little irony to the impending collapse of Barnes & Noble. The mega-retailer that drove many small, independent booksellers out of business is now being done in by the rise of Amazon. But while many book lovers may be tempted to gloat, the death of Barnes & Noble would be catastrophic – not just for publishing houses and the writers they publish, but for American culture as a whole.”

“A sort of asteroid has hit the safe world of Russian literature in English translation. A couple named Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have established an industry of taking everything they can get their hands on written in Russian and putting it into flat, awkward English.” (includes side-by-side excerpts from Anna Karenina in P&V’s translation and Constance Garnett’s)

“It is 200 years since ‘The Year Without a Summer’, when a sun-obscuring ash cloud – ejected from [Mount Tambora] – caused temperatures to plummet the world over. Gillen D’Arcy Wood looks at the humanitarian crisis triggered by the unusual weather, and how it offers an alternative lens through which to read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a book begun in its midst.”

“Two hundred years ago, describing someone as ‘devouring’ a book would have been an act of moral censure. The long, turbulent relationship between reading and eating is invisible to modern eyes, yet in our media-soaked culture, it is more pertinent than ever. The unexamined language of ‘devouring’ idealises one kind of reading at the expense of others, leaving readers impoverished.”

“Refugee Tales features stories including [Chris] Cleave’s ‘The Lorry Driver’s Tale’, [Ali] Smith’s ‘The Detainee’s Tale’, [Marina] Lewycka’s ‘The Dependant’s Tale’ … [The book] stems from refugee charity the Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group, which sends volunteers into the two detention centres at Gatwick airport to speak to the hundreds of people who are held there.”

“If you are an emerging writer now, there are more channels for you to get in front of the eyeballs of a publisher but you have to do a lot of the work yourself. There’s less work done by editors and publishers – they wait for writers to come to them with manuscripts that are fully formed.”

“The female writers, for whatever reason (men?), don’t much believe in heroes, which makes their kind of storytelling perhaps a better fit for these cynical times. Their books are light on gunplay, heavy on emotional violence. Murder is de rigueur in the genre, so people die at the hands of others—lovers, neighbors, obsessive strangers—but the body counts tend to be on the low side.”

“The evidence suggests that reading to a dog may have a beneficial effect on a number of behavioural processes which contribute to a positive effect on the environment in which reading is practiced, leading to improved reading performance,” they write.