Category: words

“Written for his high school newspaper, The Green Witch, in the early 1940s, … ‘The Moth in the Flame’ captures in a very short space the vast range of tumultuous emotions that spring from a distressing encounter.”

Turning random strings of characters into rhymed, metered verse was the brainchild of Kevin Knight, a senior research scientist at USC’s Information Sciences Institute and a professor in their Computer Science Department, and Marjan Ghazvininejad, a Ph.D. student at the institute.

“Her book was almost a word-for-word, scene-for-scene duplication of my book, except the characters’ names had been changed, and short M/M love scenes had been inserted. The only scene she didn’t include was the epilogue, which couldn’t be altered to an M/M scene. It involved the heroine in labour and the hero having sympathetic labour pains.”

“Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel … was suddenly pulled from the honors English curriculum at Illinois’s Mattoon High School because of ‘several passages that were ‘extremely’ vulgar detailing sexual acts’.”

That civilization’s main cities “boasted street planning and house drainage worthy of the twentieth century. They hosted the world’s first known toilets, along with complex stone weights, elaborately drilled gemstone necklaces and exquisitely carved seal stones featuring one of the world’s stubbornly undeciphered scripts. … Now – as a result of increased collaboration between archaeologists, linguists and experts in the digital humanities – it looks possible that the Indus script may yield some of its secrets.”

“The King James Bible may well be the greatest work of literature ever written by committee – and now we know a bit more about the collaboration that produced it.”

Since the first-ever Governor-General’s Literary Award was handed out in 1936, only three writers have won the prize for English-language fiction three times: Hugh MacLennan, Alice Munro and Michael Ondaatje.

“The library has no future as yet another Internet node, but neither will it relax into retirement as an antiquarian warehouse. Until our digital souls depart our bodies for good and float away into the cloud, we retain part citizenship in the physical world … In the midst of an information explosion, librarians are still the most versatile information specialists we have. And the purest.”

Jonathan Franzen: “What made a story New Yorker was its carefully wrought, many-comma’d prose; its long passages of physical description, the precision and the sobriety of which created a kind of negative emotional space, a suggestion of feeling without the naming of it; its well-educated white characters, who could be found experiencing the melancholies of affluence, the doldrums of suburban marriage, or the thrill or the desolation of adultery; and, above all, its signature style of ending, which was either elegantly oblique or frustratingly coy, depending on your taste.”