Category: words

“You have to get the reader on the first page of a short story, you have to convince them of a world inside page one. As writers try to capture the scattered attention of readers, I think the novel is moving towards that degree of compression.”

“The most important consequence of a wave of adoring reviews, followed by a backlash of negative opinion is that it suddenly matters whether you’re the kind of person who loved A Little Life or just didn’t.”

“What does the rest of the world see as the greatest British novels? In search of a collective critical assessment, BBC Culture contributor Jane Ciabattari polled 82 book critics, from Australia to Zimbabwe – but none from the UK. This list includes no nonfiction, no plays, no narrative or epic poems (no Paradise Lost or Beowulf), no short story collections (no Morte D’Arthur) – novels only, by British authors (which means no James Joyce).”

“The book that fits the title of ‘Great American Novel’ is often debated, with contenders including Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. Yet what elements would make up its equivalent across the Atlantic – the ‘Great British Novel’? This video attempts to answer that question – through the words of a few authors who made the top 25.”

Female novelists wrote six of the top ten titles on the list, including the top three, and make up 40% of the total. The UK certainly has a long tradition of great women authors, from Jane Austen to Hilary Mantel, but previous lists haven’t been quite so equitable. What made the difference here? (Actually, it’s those bloody foreigners.)

The work required now to have and develop a career as a writer is a full-time occupation. That is different (and requires different skills) from the art of writing itself. Is this such a bad thing?

One linguist calls it “‘intellectual used-car-salesman voice.’ You get the same kind of thing in other high-energy sales pitches. I guess the purest form of this style is the carnival barker.”

“Brian Shetler, a doctoral candidate in book history who works in the library, discovered the Bible when he was hunting through the rare-book shelves, pulling a sampling of 17th-century books printed in England to show to a history class. It was in a box with a label mentioning ‘Bible,’ ‘1611’ and ‘R. Barker,’ a seeming reference to the London printer Robert Barker.”

“There are obvious downsides to releasing a book exclusively as an app. ‘I’ll Take You There’ won’t be available in bookstores or even from e-book retailers like Amazon or Barnes & Noble when it comes out next spring. Instead, Mr. Lamb’s fans will have to buy it from the iTunes app store, and it will work only on Apple devices. Mr. Lamb said that as a music and film lover, he was excited by the prospect of enhancing a narrative with music, film clips and video.”

“Who has more dedication: the person who has the financial wherewithal to spend time in a writing program, or the writer who writes despite having to work full-time, early in the morning, with absolutely no one but themselves for motivation?”