“Todd Friedman, a 29-year public-school veteran who teaches at Midwood High School [in Brooklyn], was put on administrative duty – and faces possible termination – after the city Department of Education slapped him with disciplinary charges. His crime: He personally ordered 102 paperback copies of the novel from a publisher last September for his Advanced Placement students.”
Category: words
What Makes An American Essay ‘American’?
“The essay, in its American incarnation, is a direct outgrowth of the sermon: argumentative, insistent, not infrequently irritating. Americans, in my observation – and despite our fetish for the beauties of individuality and personal freedom – are always, however smilingly, trying to convince somebody, somewhere, of something, and our essayistic tradition bears this out.”
Pulp Fiction Will Never Die
“Mainstream literary writers — people like Anne Tyler, who I like very much — are fighting over a smaller and smaller patch of ground. And genre writers are writing with more maturity. What genre writers understand now is that when someone dies, someone is out there to mourn them. Every death has a repercussion. So there’s a maturity that wasn’t always there before. These are novels about social conscience, reflecting what’s going on in our world.”
I Read Proust On My Cellphone – And It Was Good
Sarah Boxer: “When I tell people this, they look at me like I have drowned a kitten. … But reading Proust on my cellphone was, I have to say, like no other reading experience I’ve had before or since. It was magical and – dare I say it? – Proustian in a very peculiar way.”
The International Man Booker Prize Goes To A Book About A Woman Whose Vegetarianism Ruins Relationships (And Her Life)
“The novel had an unusual path to publication. Deborah Smith, a 28-year-old British translator, read a Korean edition of ‘The Vegetarian’ about four years ago when she was studying for her Ph.D., and decided to send a sample translation to a British publisher, who was won over by the first 10 pages.”
An International Glossary Of Happiness
“Could understanding other cultures’ concepts of joy and well-being help us reshape our own? The Positive Lexicography Project aims to catalogue foreign terms for happiness that have no direct English translation.”
Women Writers Swept Science Fiction’s Nebula Awards
“The science fiction world has had its share of drama with the Hugo Awards as various slates have worked aggressively to push against the growing numbers of women and people of color appearing on award ballots.”
When Every Book Suddenly Had To Get Five Stars
“I was shaking my pom-poms for books. However, I wasn’t doing so because I was an industry shill, shallow, or self-interested. I failed to provide meaningful criticism, information, or recommendations because I was, like so many of my colleagues, frightened about the future of books and publishing. In desperate times, the desperate tilt at windmills.”
Print Was Never Dead, But It’s Rising Again Anyway
“Publishing, like other industries before (and since), suffered a bad attack of technodazzle: It failed to distinguish between newness and value. It could read digital’s hysterical cheerleaders, but not predict how a market of human beings would respond to a product once the novelty had passed. It ignored human nature. Reading the meaning of words is not consuming a manufacture: it is experience.”
In A Snapchat World, Does Queer Poetry Still Matter?
“Queerness was present in poetry long before queer was queer or gay was gay.”