“When a book is viewed by so many as holy, and when millions of people consider it the word of God, the stakes are much higher. Acknowledging that there is a translation issue, and that an alternative reading is possible, or that you may be reading a mistranslation, means the reader has to think deeply about what he or she actually believes.”
Category: words
Literary Festivals Are Booming In India
“Close to 100 populate the land; not long ago, the concept was virtually unknown here. … As the festivals have blossomed, they have also turned into something more than strictly literary: a mixture of the public square and the television studio, or forums where India talks to itself. … [And] increasingly, [these events] are being thrust into wider culture wars.”
Traditional Newspapers Are Doomed. Now A Fight For Control Of Distribution
“Having a legacy business configured around a website is now almost as much of a headache as the rumbling printing press, fuelled by paper and money. It is likely we will start to see studio or agency models emerge where publishing models once were, trying to create value around relationships and services rather than packages and products.”
Umberto Eco Taught The World To Think About Conspiracies And Fascism
“Suddenly Eco was back in my feed, being used to prove that one of the most notorious presidential candidates in US history was no worse than Mussolini or even Hitler.”
The Translator Who Is Often Accused Of Being The (Mysterious) Author
“Just in case anyone was wondering if Goldstein is Ferrante, she’d like to clear that up right away: ‘No, I am not. I can say that without equivocation,’ she tells NPR’s Linda Wertheimer. ‘And I can also say I don’t know who she is.'”
Use This One Little Word In Your Thriller Title To Turn It Into A Bestseller
“There’s this sort of shorthand that if it has ‘girl’ in the title, then I know what to expect.”
Why Are So-Called Bad Words Actually Bad?
It might have little to do with the sound or force of the words: “Swearing is a form of dispreferred linguistic behaviour.”
Strategy: Storied Publisher’s Success In Staying Small
New Directions evolved as it did because its founder was as far-seeing in business as he was in matters of taste.
This Guy Is Trying To Review The World’s Literature. All Of It.
“As of last Friday, according to an analog counter on the site’s decidedly unglamorous homepage, it had reviewed three thousand six hundred and eighty-seven books, from a hundred different countries, originally published in sixty-eight different languages—an average of two hundred and thirty books a year.”
The Author Of The Banned Picture Book About George Washington’s Chef Gives Her Side Of The Story
Ramin Ganeshram, author of A Birthday Cake for George Washington: “It goes without saying that these and other enslaved people were not happy to be enslaved. It goes without saying that their lives were harder and crueler than we could possibly imagine … Nonetheless, Hercules did not fit the ‘norms’ of his time. … To say that [he] couldn’t have done certain things or lived a certain way because others who suffered under the criminal institution of slavery did not, is simply not historically true.”