Category: words

“After a list of the top 20 academic books was pulled together by expert academic booksellers, librarians and publishers …, the public was asked to vote on what they believed to be the most influential.” The winner – a volume arguably at the very heart of America’s culture wars – finished well ahead of Marx’s Communist Manifesto, the complete works of Shakespeare, Plato’s The Republic, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and Smith’s The Wealth of Nations.

Libraries are powerful precisely because they’re spaces of potentiality. They are, as the Aspen report puts it, “platforms,” foundations on which many structures can be built. To speak of their future, then, should be to speak of a collective future, one from which none are excluded.

For a second consensus-free year in a row, Giller prognosticators were all over the place when asked to pinpoint a front-runner. “It’s almost Game of Thrones — you don’t know who’s going to come out alive out of the bloodbath.”

“How can people like these stories, with their over-easy packaging of what are no doubt extremely complex personal problems, their evident and decidedly unexamined complacency about the rightness of the analyst’s intervention?”

There is “a new generation of young, digitally astute poets whose loyal online followings have helped catapult them onto the best-seller lists, where poetry books are scarce. These amateur poets are not winning literary awards, and most have never been in a graduate writing workshop.”

Grenoble, France “will soon be home to a handful of devices that dispense short stories rather than sugary snacks or soft drinks. The machines will offer a choice of stories one, three, or five minutes long, and their bank of 600 short stories, determined by the publisher Short Édition’s thousands of subscribers and writers, is free of charge.”

“A Lebanese satirical comic last week threw what may prove to be either its final launch party – or the first of its resurrection. The event marked Samandal magazine’s attempt to crowdfund its way out of oblivion after three of its editors were convicted of crimes against religion and fined for their work, nearly putting the experimental comics collective out of business.”

“It’s a bizarre act of self-mutilation to say that ‘I don’t get on with science fiction and fantasy, therefore I’m never going to read any,'” Mitchell says. “What a shame. All those great books that you’re cutting yourself off from.”

“The collection includes letters from aristocrats, spies, merchants, publishers, actors, musicians, barely literate peasants and highly educated people with beautiful handwriting, and are written in French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Latin.”