Category: words

“What frustrated Tolstoy the most was how Shakespeare neglected to furnish his characters with clear reasons for their actions, how he left a play’s meanings and intentions ambiguous.”

“Did I stop there. Uh uh. I think because I grew up in an alcoholic household and I was suspending belief so often as a child just to survive that it now felt like a bicep flex.”

“Balancing users’ rights with those of creators is always a tricky business and when the previous Conservative government updated the copyright law in 2012, publishers and writers warned that it had made far too large and vague an exemption for educational purposes, considering that digital copying in universities and photocopying in schools is standard practice and was licensed to the education sector by publishers. At the time, provincial education ministries promised they would only copy what was fair, but defining fair has proved highly contentious.”

“Over the years there would be female secretaries, copywriters, reviewers, and editors at Knopf. There would be women in charge of little magazines and the children’s-book divisions of big publishers. But there would be no other woman in the publishing industry with the status of Blanche Knopf—either in the 1920s, when she signed Langston Hughes and Willa Cather, or in the 1950s, when she celebrated Albert Camus’s Nobel prize and oversaw the translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. And despite it all, although her husband swore he’d put her name on the masthead, he never did.”

“All around the world, shadow libraries keep growing, filled with banned materials. But no actual papers trade hands: everything is digital, and the internet-accessible content is not banned for shocking content so much as that modern crime, copyright infringement. But for the people who run the world’s pirate libraries, their goals are no less ambitious for their work’s illicit nature.”

“The piece was written for the March 1960 issue of The Grapevine, a magazine for FBI professionals … The article was about the gruesome murder of Herb and Bonnie Clutter, and their teenage children Nancy and Kenyon at their farmhouse in Kansas” – the crime that Lee helped Truman Capote research for his book In Cold Blood.

“Certain critics have balked at Sittenfeld’s irreverently contemporary retelling of what many consider Austen’s masterpiece. But I found Eligible to be a lot of fun—a novel of manners recast as a novel of terrible manners.”

“Few people realize that children’s literature has a canon, like music or dance. The superstore model and then the Internet model have destroyed publishers’ backlists. Whether it’s the ‘Little House’ books or ‘The Story About Ping’ and ‘The Five Chinese Brothers,’ there are thousands of classics that are not being connected back to the culture. We want to renew and revive and regenerate older titles.”

“On a recent visit, a guide told his group that Cervantes would have been better honored had he lived in London instead of Madrid, even though he lived in the same district of the city, aptly known as the Barrio de Las Letras (the literary quarter), as several other writers of the so-called Spanish Golden Age.”