“Let’s face it, there is no depth to which linguists will not sink in their hunt for the oddities of language. … Just to emphasize, yes, there are actual serious-ass, um, analyses about the word ass.”
Category: words
You Binge-Watch TV So Maybe Now You’ll Binge-Read Books (One Publisher’s Bet)
“Farrar Straus and Giroux believes the TV model can lend momentum to a book series. In a move that takes as much from Victorian novels as from limited-run Netflix series, the publisher’s FSG Originals imprint is experimenting with serialized fiction.”
Using Astronomy To Date A Sappho Poem
In one of her rare surviving works, “Sappho describes a night when the moon, and the star cluster Pleiades, set before midnight on the island of Lesbos. Now, in the tradition of trying to paint a biographical portrait of Sappho from her work, a group of astronomers and a physicist at the University of Texas, Arlington have attempted to seasonally date ‘Midnight Poem’ using these bits of data.”
The Hamilton Algorithm (Or How Does He Make All Those Words Work?)
Here’s a word-by-word analysis plus a nifty playback tool that shows you how the “Hamilton” rap works.
Annie Proulx Is Way Over Navel-Gazing Novels
“I think people probably miss those books that were written some time ago – the big book that was written with care.”
Massive Plagiarism In The Age Of Self-Publishing
“The offending books often stay up for weeks or even months at a time before they’re detected, usually by an astute reader. For the authors, this intrusion goes beyond threatening their livelihood. Writing a novel is a form of creative expression, and having it stolen by someone else, many say, can feel like a personal violation.”
Special New X-Rays Reveal The Secrets Of Medieval Manuscripts
“Bookbinders used to cut up and recycle handwritten books from the middle ages, which had become old-fashioned following the invention of printing. These fragments, described by Kwakkel as ‘stowaways from a distant past’, are within as many as one in five early modern age printed books.”
Writers Need Better Ways To Talk About Africa’s Past And Present
“Han Solo, Chewbacca and the Tynwald land tenure rebellion do not form any part of the popular narrative that informs discussion of Zimbabwe’s current predicament. And yet, it is memories such as these – of ordinary citizens standing up against the colour bar, of the euphoria in the first days of our hard-won independence – that have the potential to inspire the desire for change today.”
Are Hardcover Books The New Vinyl?
“It’s a deeply satisfying experience to hold something in your hands that you actually went to look for. To know that few people will ever appreciate what you went through to get what you now have.”
Youngest-Ever Winner Of $65k Griffin Poetry Prize
Adam Sol, who served on the jury alongside Alice Oswald and Tracy K. Smith (they considered 633 books of poetry from more than 40 countries) said it was the “ambition and reach” of Liz Howard’s book that “made her work stand out. This is a debut book – holy crap. Who knows what she’ll do next.”