Category: words

“It’s not uncommon in mainland China for company executives and dissidents to be detained for lengthy periods by the authorities or vanish without anyone claiming responsibility, but the disappearances are unprecedented in Hong Kong and have shocked the city’s publishing industry.”

“Booksellers are, generally speaking, a cautious group when it comes to voicing optimism, but I sense a cultural shift coming on: Books and bookstores and reading are the wave of the future.”

“Just two years after winning the Costa novel award for Life After Life, … the novelist has landed the prize again for her follow-up, A God in Ruins. … Along with Atkinson, four other writers were named as winners in different categories” – biography, poetry, children’s lit, and first novel – “each of whom will receive £5,000.” The Costa Book of the Year will be announced on January 26.

“He is known as a crime writer, but that doesn’t quite capture what he does. His books are love stories, political dramas, mordant cautionary tales. Characters who are Latino, black and white, artists, professionals and laborers, are described in staccato chapters, like a catchy corrido. ‘It’s hard to find anything about Latinos in fiction about Denver,’ Ramos says. ‘I’m doing something that’s not done.'”

“The works are hidden treasures, many of them awaiting discovery. Not even the curators and librarians know everything that is there. ‘There were many materials in the library’s special collections that I had never seen before,’ Mr. Baumann said. ‘The range and depth of our collections never ceases to astonish me.'”

“As publishers have become more aware of Mr. Gates’s reviews — missing the publicity they used to get from Oprah Winfrey’s televised book club or from the regular author appearances on ‘The Colbert Report,’ which have been less frequent since Stephen Colbert moved to CBS from Comedy Central — they have tried to figure out how to get their new books in front of him.”

“Science is an epistemology. It is a way of knowing the world and certain things in the world. Science fiction is genre fiction, and genre, too, is an epistemology. The things that science fiction and genre know in the world are different, as are the modes, methods, and determinations of each.”

Winnipeg’s McNally Robinson Booksellers became Canada’s largest independent bookstore by offering a fun, stimulating place for booklovers.

“Finishing every book you start is not just annoying — it’s counter-productive. There will never ever be enough time to read every worthwhile book. Even spending almost every spare second reading, there were titles I returned to the library, spines woefully uncracked.”

“They had been pried from their favorite television shows to attend – of all things – a poetry reading. Some nice people from the public library, they were told. Then came the poet: unshaven, in his early 20s, dark hooded sweatshirt, dark T-shirt, dark ball cap slung backward on his head. Some men leaned forward, elbows on their knees. Expressions shifted to curiosity: This was not what they were expecting.”