“Women’s literary ambitions are not a recent phenomenon. [Woolson] was a writer who aimed for and reached the heights of literary recognition, despite even greater obstacles than those facing women writers today. The fact that Woolson has been buried under decades of critical neglect should matter to anyone who is concerned about the VIDA count and the reputations of women writers.”
Category: words
The Man Who Invented The Psychological Novel (He Was A Moralistic Prig)
“His self-serious moralizing and the ostentatiousness of his characters’ rectitude make Richardson difficult to embrace. Yet, unlike the more urbane and congenial Fielding, Richardson has a knack for psychological realism and an ability to craft characters whose clamorous inner lives continue, almost three centuries later, to feel real to us.”
So E-Books Are Down And Paper Books Are Up. What Happened?
“What went wrong? Clearly 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.”
Tehran Book Fair Has A Photo Booth Where People Pose In Front Of Syrian War Rubble
“One woman is seen posing with a grenade in her hand. A man had his photo taken with a little boy sitting on his lap.” Weirder still is who put the booth there.
Study: We Process What We Read Differently Depending On Whether It’s In Print Or On A Tablet
“It finds we remember concrete details better if we’ve read a work on a laptop or tablet. However, we grasp the larger inferences of a story more thoroughly if we’ve read it in print.”
Anton Chekhov, Experimental Post-Modernist
“Aside from stories that he was writing in a more traditional form, Chekhov’s young, experimental pen wrote stories in the form of census reports, statistical surveys, diary excerpts, stories in the form of lists of mathematical problems, lonely hearts advertisements, mini-plays – he even wrote a one-page love story in the form of a legal deposition, with a place in the upper left-hand corner of the page for a government stamp.”
The Weird, Brilliant Names Charles Dickens Invented For His Minor Characters
“Allow me to introduce Mr Plornishmaroontigoonter. Lord Podsnap, Count Smorltork, and Sir Clupkins Clogwog. Not to mention the dowager Lady Snuphanuph. As for Serjeant Buzfuz, Miss Snevellicci, Mrs. Wrymug, and the Porkenhams … They are the best of names, they are the worst of names, from an age of onomastic wisdom and hypocoristic foolishness, an epoch of … well you get the picture.”
A New Retro Machine For Writing
“The screen isn’t really for staring at like a computer screen, but just for glancing toward to verify a word or to get one’s bearings while writing. While it takes a bit of getting used to, the touch-typist eventually stops looking at the screen entirely, and begins instead to look around the environment. I can’t overstate how liberating this feels.”
Tracking Ideas On Wikipedia Is Like Mapping A Huge Drainage System
“To begin their investigation, the researchers followed the first links from all 11 million pages in the English edition of Wikipedia, enabling them to map out a sort of drainage system of ideas, one idea flowing into the next like water from a mountain spring making its way to the sea.”
Myanmar’s Famous Street Of Second-Hand Books
“If you want to learn what happened here, go to Pansodan Road, where all the city’s used books end up. They arrive each morning in massive rice sacks.”