Category: words

“Danmei, meaning ‘indulgence in beauty’, is China’s version of what is often called ‘slash’ fiction in other countries. … The genre is only available online in China”

“Her mouth was intensely ovoid, an almond mouth, of citrus crescents. And under that sling, her breasts were like young fawns, sheep frolicking in hyssop – Psalms were about to pour out of me.”

Coates adds the nonfiction award for Between the World and Me to the Kirkus Prize he won last month and the MacArthur “genius” Fellowship he received in September. Johnson’s short story collection Fortune Smiles edged out the presumed frontrunners, Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life and Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies. (includes full list of winners and nominees)

– antimeria, “a rhetorical device that repurposes a word as a different part of speech than usual. In exposing that word’s ability to be understood across grammatical categories, antimeria … does more than surprise or joke or streamline (or sow surprise or crack a joke or render prose more streamlined). Antimeria unlocks a word’s essence. Thing is, a lot of people hate antimeria.”

While it presents itself to the general public as being a competition purely about literary merit, every writer, editor and publisher knows that NBA juries also have to consider matters like popularity and accessibility in anointing a tome as the One Book That Ruled Them All.

Dana Stevens: “If by ‘we’ you mean ‘I,’ then yes, probably. … When we mourn the early death of a writer who was just beginning to find his or her true voice, we’re also mourning, by implication, every work that author never finished, or never started.”
Benjamin Moser: “A dead young writer is, above all, a dead human being. … And the fine line that separates romance from treacle is the same that divides mourning from kitsch; to cross it is to glorify a heart-rending death instead of remembering the achievements of a life.”

“Hemingway said being a reporter was useful for a writer. He also said staying too long in journalism was damaging. Writing becomes so routinized that the words lack emotional force, exactly the opposite of literature. “

“Readers will still make their way to the 3 million libraries to see whatever unique collections they have, but readers will also find in those places much of what they now go there to find: intelligent people engaged in the work of knowledge and the work of community.”

Casper Grathwohl, president of Oxford Dictionaries: “Traditional alphabet scripts have been struggling to meet the rapid-fire, visually focused demands of 21st Century communication. It’s not surprising that a pictographic script like emoji has stepped in to fill those gaps – it’s flexible, immediate, and infuses tone beautifully.”

“Dostoevsky was writing about losers. The main character of The Iliad, Hector, is a loser. … Madame Bovary is a loser. Julien Sorel is a loser. I am doing only the same job. Losers are more fascinating. Winners are stupid … because usually they win by chance.”