Category: words

“This year, NASA confirmed the existence of liquid water on Mars, raising the possibility of Martian life; a genetically engineered animal can now be sold for human consumption, as in a tale by Margaret Atwood; and a Silicon Valley research institute was formed to create a computer with the intellectual ability of a human, and to confront the threat such artificial intelligence poses to humanity. …”

“‘This is my suit. Color it gray or I will lose my job,’ reads a caption next to a picture of a man getting dressed for work” in 1961’s Executive Coloring Book. “The coloring books that followed managed to cover, between them, a selection of the decade’s neuroses: national security, the red scare, technology, sex, mental illness. … There were coloring books that made fun of communists and coloring books that made fun of people who were scared of communists.”

“The cause of the fire is being investigated. The museum, which is located in a century-old building, houses historic texts about the evolution of the Portuguese language. Officials said that the loss of ancient documents may be minimised as there are backups of many texts.”

Owned by experienced bookseller Yoshiyuki Morioka, the store opened in May, stocking multiple copies of just one title, which changes weekly. This bookstore that sells only one book could also be described as ‘a bookstore that organises an exhibition derived from a single book’.

“Used bookstores, with their quintessential quirkiness, eclectic inventory and cheap prices, find themselves in the catbird seat as the pendulum eases back toward print. In many cities, that’s a de facto position: They’re the only book outlets left.”

Customers regularly threaten booksellers with Amazon, like it’s a weapon they can deploy to get what they want from us. “I could get this much cheaper on Amazon,” people tell me when checking out.

“For several months this year, Mario Bellatin, one of Mexico’s best-known novelists, waged a quixotic war against Grupo Planeta, the largest publishing group in the Spanish-language world. An eccentric public figure who wears a variety of striking, artist-designed prostheses in lieu of his missing right forearm, Bellatin had an unwavering demand: that Planeta unpublish his magnum opus, Salón de Belleza.”

“Suspended somewhere between a tangible (albeit exquisitely staged) reality of paper and wood, and a perceptible (albeit artfully obscured) reality of pipes and machinery, the bookstore customer is able to experience a curated version of the ethical and visceral tension between front-of-house and back-of-house—between the sleek one-click seamlessness of the screen and the unceasing labor of the fulfillment center—as a kind of pleasure.”

In November, Allen Prowle won the Stephen Spender Prize for Johnson Brothers Ltd, his translation of a volume by Dutch poet Rutger Kopland. “But Dutch poetry site Nederlandse Poëzie Encyclopedie claimed last week that Prowle’s submissions this year ‘aren’t superb translations at all, but blatant plagiarism’.”

But don’t perseverate. “It’s easy to get too caught up in being perfectly “correct” and become a tedious language snob. Remember you probably want to come across as intelligent and thoughtful, not uptight and pedantic.”