Category: words

Michael Seidenberg’s approach to business is mostly as a transaction between bibliophiles. Some books he will only sell if he detects true enthusiasm from the buyer. “I’m a slow bookseller,” said Seidenberg. “I have a huge relationship to my stock.”

As of next March, the rest of us really can read Playboy for the articles – which the editors plan to beef up, harking back to the glory days of the 1960s and ’70s, when the magazine published stories by the likes of Gore Vidal and Margaret Atwood and interviews with Martin Luther King Jr., Jimmy Carter, and John and Yoko. Says company CEO Scott Flanders, “The difference between us and Vice is that we’re going after the guy with a job.”

The Times business section takes “look back at what made the publication and its lifestyle so prominent.”

He is the first Jamaican author to win the Man Booker Prize. Receiving the award, he said a huge part of the novel had been inspired by reggae music.

Tehran on Wednesday said it was boycotting the Frankfurt fair, because it had “under the pretext of freedom of expression, invited a person who is hated in the Islamic world and created the opportunity for Salman Rushdie… to make a speech”. It also urged other Muslim nations to join its boycott.

“Her method is the close interrogation of the past through the collection of individual voices; patient in overcoming cliché, attentive to the unexpected, and restrained in the exposition, her writing reaches those far beyond her own experiences and preoccupations, far beyond her generation, and far beyond the lands of the former Soviet Union.”

“Must world literature be limited to a few popular movie and fiction genres? The alternative is a conception of world literature as global classicism that is more inclusive in terms of forms and genres — but more exclusive in terms of audience.”

Last week, City Paper was “purchased by Broad Street Media, a small local media conglomerate that owns the city’s other alt-weekly, Philadelphia Weekly. The staff only learned that their publication, and their jobs, would soon cease to exist after other journalists started calling them for information.”

Editor Lillian Swanson: “But what I regret most is that Philly will be left without a real alternative voice, one that speaks truth to power and tells stories others have overlooked. Who will focus on writing the first serious ink about artists and singers who are on the way up? How will those who open independent theaters get the press they need to become viable? Who but CP will review more than 40 Fringe shows? Where else will you find a full-page comic?”

Karrie Higgins: “When I first started writing ‘forensically,’ I thought forensic science was going to be THE way for me to understand the world and convey what was happening inside my head. This constant push-pull and intense desire to expose reasonable doubt—a kind of confidence in doubt as the only viable narrative. When I got to Utah and started embracing the more magical elements of Mormonism, I started to think differently about forensics.”