Category: words

“It’s been a banner year for authors who are no longer around to celebrate their success. A groaning shelf of recently published works by deceased brand-name writers, or those filling their literary shoes, shows that when it comes to books, gone does not mean forgotten. Or even unpublishable. Not by a long shot.”

“Having reviewed three of Pamuk’s pre-Nobel novels—The New Life, My Name Is Red, and Snow, that last the book probably most responsible for the Nobel—I see his recent fiction differently: as premature retirement from stealth cultural critic to curator of nostalgia.”

Jhumpa Lahiri: “I’ve been writing in Italian for almost two years, and I feel that I’ve been transformed, almost reborn. But the change, this new opening, is costly; like Daphne [after she was turned into a tree], I, too, find myself confined. I can’t move as I did before, the way I was used to moving in English. A new language, Italian, covers me like a kind of bark. I remain inside: renewed, trapped, relieved, uncomfortable.”

And it’s full of literary fiction, poetry and nonfiction, with the occasional genre book tossed in.

“First, be sure to send an immediate message to the head of your workplace, if you have one, to initiate damage control. Because the coverage will soon be explosive: Photos of your face will appear on websites from Vietnam to the Czech Republic. I hope you didn’t opt for that fashionably roguish author photo, because the ‘bad sex’ headline will make it seem like the mug shot of an international sex criminal.”

In just the past decade, vexingly different figures have been reported — 1.8 million in The New York Times in 2009, four million by The Associated Press in 2013.

With his passion for books, Saeed Jan Qureshi built one of the biggest bookstores in the world — mostly selling books in English, in a country where that is a second language for most people.

“Peake then has each student create a grid marking everyone’s name and guessing the motives of potential perpetrators. The students start to interrogate one another, flexing their past-tense prowess as they pick over alibis. Portuguese is banned from the classroom; if anyone veers into speaking in their native tongue, Peake employs the element of surprise, sneaking up on students to tell them their English sounds somewhat suspect.”

While administering a language-based experiment, psychology researcher Chris Westbury “noticed that people always laughed when they saw the non-word ‘snunkoople.’ That got them wondering – was there something in particular about nonsense words that made them funny? If so, could it be measured? Turns out there is and it can.”