“Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos put it more clearly than most last year when he noted that books are no longer competing only against other books: ‘You’re competing against Candy Crush and everything else.’ The real battle isn’t between screen and paper editions, or even between Amazon and Hachette: it’s between one person trying to conjure a world in words, and another inviting me to match coloured shapes in lines until my eyes glaze into darkness.”
Category: words
Translate: An Unusually High Number Of Translated Books Have Made This Year’s Top Critics Lists
The 13 translated works on this year’s NYT list mark a 62.5 percent increase over last year’s numbers.
Why Do We Need Libraries Anymore?
Today, when electronic technology announces (perhaps prematurely) the death of paper and promises us unfading memory of many millions of texts and images, as well as apparently limitless storage in cyberspace, the question “What is a library?” pops up with satisfying frequency on our bookshelves, both virtual and concrete.
Our Ephemeral World: How The Record Of Today’s History Is In Danger
“There is no guarantee that we will be able to read today’s news on tomorrow’s computers. I’ve been studying news preservation for the past two years, and I can confidently say that most media companies use a preservation strategy that resembles Swiss cheese.”
How Jane Vonnegut Made Kurt A Writer
“Jane knew what her husband should do with his life: he should write. And she seems to have made it her first mission as his spouse to convince him of that. … Many of the ideas and themes that characterize Vonnegut were born in the conversation between Kurt and Jane, and throughout his career she remained a voice in the text. She was there: that was her.”
Where Book Titles Come From
“Writers are at least as picky about the titles of their novels as parents are about their children’s names; often more so. This is perhaps to be expected, as a book’s conception is considerably less pleasurable, and the gestation period generally lasts far longer than nine months.”
Are Our Novels Getting More Conventional?
“Even beyond financial questions I would argue that there is a growing resistance at every level to taking risks in novel writing, a tendency that is in line with the more general and ever increasing anxious desire to receive positive feedback, or at least not negative feedback, about almost everything we do, constantly and instantly.”
The 2015 Bad Sex In Fiction Award Goes To An Actual Rock Star
“At this, Eliza and Ezra rolled together into the one giggling snowball of full-figured copulation, screaming and shouting as they playfully bit and pulled at each other in a dangerous and clamorous rollercoaster coil of sexually violent rotation with Eliza’s breasts barrel-rolled across Ezra’s howling mouth and the pained frenzy …” (We’ll spare you the rest.)
Literary Taste Versus What Sells And Is “Successful”
“Many novels that do sell well are mass-market genre reads—romance, mystery, and the like—that travelers pick up in airports or shoppers grab off of discount tables at Walmart. Many novels that don’t sell well, meanwhile, are the kind argued over in highbrow publications.”
English Is Such An Odd Language. But How Did It Get That Way?
Why is our language so eccentric? Just what is this thing we’re speaking, and what happened to make it this way?