Category: words

“The beloved first sentence is the product of dramatic changes one hundred and fifty years into the novel’s history. There are ample studies of the rise of the novel, but the move that would become the novel’s calling card has virtually no critical history.”

“Underlying all his characters was his fascination with how different people might experience differently the same situation. … Where Tasso’s verses describe for Tasso and his readers the essence of war, Cervantes’ prose describes how his characters perceive and misperceive war. Tasso’s words paint heroes; Cervantes’ lines animate characters.”

It irks the South Korean establishment that a nation as large and wealthy as theirs has won only one Nobel (the 2000 Peace Prize, to President Kim Dae-jung). So a huge effort is being made to translate and distribute the country’s literature to the rest of the world (including the Nobel committee). even though Koreans themselves aren’t big lit readers. (And there’s only one clear candidate.)

“I have far too many examples of workshops in which my peers have expressed aversion to writers engaging with issues of social justice or race… In my experience of having attended a prestigious MFA program in creative writing and having finished coursework in a prestigious PhD program in creative writing, the majority of fiction writers feel that a writer should only be concerned with aesthetics and form, i.e., the territory of true, high art. Sadly, not only is this common in fiction workshops in general, but among writers of color in fiction workshops.”

Mindwheel, a text-based game from the 1980s, “is a playful mishmash of sci-fi tropes, Pop surrealism, and allusions both high and low … The player traverse[s] the minds and memories of four deceased individuals – loosely based on major historical figures – using what the game calls a ‘neuro-electronic matrix.’ The goal is to retrieve the titular mindwheel, which ‘contains the secret of the world’s best values.'”

“Most writers of literary fiction regard bestsellers with a mixture of envy for the numbers involved and disgust for the kind of writing that often racks them up. Le Devoir lightened its assignment by presenting it as a game, with a reader poll to decide the winner.”

“The prize has been selecting a book of the year since 1985, choosing from the categories of novel, first novel, biography, children’s book and poetry. It has been compared to choosing between ‘bananas and chicken curry’ by one former judge. The only other children’s book to win was The Amber Spyglass, by Philip Pullman, in 2001.”

“Statistical analysis carried out at the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences reveal something intriguing. The composition of works from within a particular genre was characterized by the exceptional dynamics of a cascading (avalanche) narrative structure. This type of narrative turns out to be multifractal. That is, fractals of fractals are created.”

Not only did Capote’s book inspire a feature film, at least one TV mini-series, and two biopics of the author, it’s had enormous influence, right down to today’s media phenomenons Serial and Making a Murderer.