“He refused to indulge in any metropolitan disdain towards the liberating, everyday essentials of plumbing, Austin cars, aspirin, contraceptives or canned food. The wretched alternatives were ‘dirty water, an earth bucket, a four-mile walk each way to work, headaches, broken women, hunger and monotony of diet.'”
Category: words
The Studies Are Agonizingly Clear, But What Should Publishing Actually *Do*?
“I’m all too often agitated by the seeming intractability of the question I believe at the root of much if not all of this: what is the future of America? Or rather, what is America?”
Data: The World’s Most Literate Country Is…
“The factors we examined present a complex and nuanced portrait of a nation’s cultural vitality”, and that “what the rankings strongly suggest … is that these kinds of literate behaviours are critical to the success of individuals and nations in the knowledge-based economics that define our global future”.
How To Spot A Plagiarized Crossword
“As a professional crossword constructor, it is extremely hard for me to believe that what happened here is a mere coincidence.” (includes Crossword Suspicion Scale)
How MFA Programs Have Changed How We Write
“The debate has shifted from whether creativity could be taught to how well it can be taught and whether it should be taught. The stakes are real: Creative writing has become a big business—it’s estimated that it currently contributes more than $200 million a year in revenue to universities in the U.S.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates , From Writing Journalism To Writing Marvel Comics
“But when all the fantasy and reverie faded, and the time to actually write Black Panther came, those principles turned out to be not as primary as I’d thought.”
Allen Ginsburg’s Uncollected Gems
“There were hundreds of poems composed and never collected, poems spanning the broad range of his life and career. Ginsberg loved gathering his works together. He kept copies of his essays, his interviews, his music, and his speeches and organized them in large file cabinets in his office.”
Anxiety And El Greco: Garth Greenwell On How He Finished ‘What Belongs To You’
“I wasn’t sure I could make it better, and as we inched our way forward I felt I was losing my ability to make my own judgments, or my ability to see the manuscript at all. As I worked through each page I laid it face down, using the overleaf for rewrites, adding scraps and post-its as necessary.”
Was Ever Thus: Being A Writer Has Always Been Precarious
“What is ‘literary culture’?”; “What is taste?”; “Why in the English 20th century did certain kinds of writing prosper only for others to fall by the wayside?”; “Why did certain critics succeed in forming or altering the opinions of the literary public and others fail?” “How much?”
U.S. Supreme Court Declines Appeal Of Apple Ebook Price Fixing Case
“The Supreme Court on Monday refused to review an appeals court’s determination that Apple had conspired with book publishers to raise the prices of digital books. The court’s order, which following custom was issued without any accompanying explanation, puts into effect a $450 million settlement that Apple had agreed to pay if it lost the case.”