Category: words

“For Bangladeshi authors and bloggers, religious fanaticism is putting their security and freedom of speech at stake, in a level of repression only comparable to dictatorial regimes of the past. K Anis Ahmed explains what it means to be a writer in Bangladesh’s harrowing ‘new normal.'”

“Hicklin aims to make bookselling more selective and personal — in other words, everything that Amazon is not — by attaching familiar names to titles and having them explain why those books have shaped them.”

“The house, in a quiet part of Mexico City, had a study within, and in the study he found a solitude he had never known before and would never know again. Cigarettes (he smoked 60 a day) were on the worktable. LPs were on the record player: Debussy, Bartók, A Hard Day’s Night. Stuck up on the wall were charts of the history of a Caribbean town he called Macondo and the genealogy of the family he named the Buendías. Outside, it was the 1960s; inside, it was the deep time of the pre-modern Americas, and the author at his typewriter was all-powerful.”

“We, all of us, men and women, encode masculinity and femininity in implicit metaphorical schemas that divide the world in half. Science and mathematics are hard, rational, real, serious, and masculine. Literature and art are soft, emotional, unreal, frivolous, and feminine.” Siri Hustvedt, who is both a novelist and a science writer, looks at that division, the ways Knausgaard’s My Struggle crosses it, and how that affects the way he is seen as a writer.

“Wales saw the biggest loss in the last year, with a fall from 308 to 274. In England, the number of libraries fell from 3,142 to 3,076, while Scotland saw a drop from 573 to 567. The closures coincide with government funding cuts of £50m to UK library services in the past year.”

Researchers led by Binghamton University’s Celia Klin report that text messages ending with a period are perceived as being less sincere, probably because the people sending them are heartless.

“Sometimes, advances are made at the expense of already established forms; other times, the established forms are themselves challenged and reinvigorated by the resulting blowback. At this moment, it’s the shifting sands between fiction and nonfiction that compel attention.”

From her announcement: “Due to some spilled genetic Super-Splicer, our hero got tangled up with both a cat and an owl; hence his fur and feathers, and his identity problems. … Angel Catbird is a humorous, action-driven, pulp-inspired story. And the only other thing I can tell you at this early date is to expect a lot of cat puns.”

“It wasn’t a matter of their accents, or the sound of their voices, it was the way they were talking. The only word that came to mind was … bouncy.”