Thomas Mallon: “If I had been unwilling to deviate from what Gore Vidal used to call the ‘agreed-upon facts,’ there wouldn’t have been much point to writing a novel instead of a history.” Ayana Mathis: “At the risk of stating the obvious, truth and fact are not the same things. Our belief in the truthfulness of facts is mutable.”
Category: words
Stop Hating On Puns: They’re Useful, They’re Ubiquitous, They’re More Complex Than You Think, And They Deserve Respect (As Long As They’re Clever)
“The fact is, quite a lot of ordinary people enjoy puns. So why is the pun looked down upon? Is its reputation as an inferior form of wordplay really deserved? … It turns out puns are pretty weird, linguistically speaking, given what we think we know about words and what they signify.”
How Amazon Is Trying To Reinvent The Physical Bookstore
“Not only is it one of Amazon’s first physical locations, but it’s also Amazon’s first physical bookstore. Amazon says that it won’t entirely be doing things like a traditional store, however; it’ll be relying on Amazon.com data — including customer ratings, sales totals, and Goodread’s popularity — to decide which books to stock. Curators will have some say, too.”
Independent French Bookstores Celebrate As Fixed-Pricing For Books Continues
Last month, that threat was taken off the table by the European Union’s chief negotiator, who stated unequivocally that fixed book pricing — or “le prix unique” in French — would not be a matter of debate.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s ‘Half Of A Yellow Sun’ Named Best Women’s Prize For Fiction Winner Of The Decade
“Pitted against nine other titles – from Zadie Smith’s On Beauty to Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing – Adichie’s novel of the Biafran war … has been named the best winner of the [Baileys] women’s prize for fiction of the last decade – by both the public and a 10-strong judging panel.”
What’s The Point Of Nonfiction Books When You Can Look Everything Up Online?
“The information may be finite and fixed but it can be has been specially selected which makes it have more coherence. This can give readers an experience that is different from searching the internet but equally satisfying.”
As We Mourn Grantland, Here Are Some Of Its Best Longform Stories
Including stories on the death of the half-hour comedy show, a deep dive into NYT wedding announcements, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Los Angeles and much more.
How Safe Is Iran For Readers And Writers?
Ask Azar Nafisi, the woman who wrote “Reading Lolita in Tehran,” and she’ll tell you: “the truth of the matter is that the laws have remained the same, and there is no real security until there is real reform and real change. As you can tell from reading Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch, the human rights situation in Iran — the situation of journalists, writers, political prisoners — that also remains the same.”
Do We Seriously Still Need A ‘Women’s Prize’ For Fiction?
“What was it that meant that women’s work was not seen, somehow, as valuable as the writing of their male counterparts. Tradition; nervousness about a plurality of voices; a sense that some subjects were more important than others?”
How The New York Public Library Is Reinventing Itself
“These days, digitization of the NYPL collections falls under the aegis of NYPL Labs – which began as a catchall name for a range of digital experiments, then became an in-house, prototype-building research and development group, and now is a full-fledged department that’s broadly responsible for both the digital and experimental sides of the library and its branches.”