Category: words

“Super Thursday is the day when publishers release many of the big titles expected to greet eager readers, and elderly relatives, on 25 December. In 2015 there are 404 of them: that, remarkably, represents something of a record, last year we counted 315. In other words: it is a big moment for a book business still highly reliant on gift purchases, and a time of extreme activity for booksellers. And excitement, too, of course. This is fun.”

“When he’s on a job, leaving fake signs and objects in his gym, at IKEA, in book stores, in chain stores, on the street or at a museum, he tries to be sneaky. Once the deed is done, ‘I run away as fast as possible,’ he says. Since January, Wysaski, a Los Angeles comedy writer who runs the website Pleated Jeans, has been planting jokes in the real world. “

“Containers matter. They shape stories and the experience of stories. Choose the right binding, cloth, trim size, texture of paper, margins and ink, and you will strengthen the bond between reader and text. Choose badly and the object becomes a wedge between reader and text.”

“One of the oldest narratives in the world got a surprise update last month when the Sulaymaniyah Museum in the Kurdistan region of Iraq announced that it had discovered 20 new lines of the Babylonian-Era poem of gods, mortals, and monsters.”

Said the Islamic Republic’s deputy minister for culture and Islamic guidance, “This has been organised by the Frankfurt book fair and crosses one of our political system’s red lines. We consider this move as anti-cultural. Imam Khomeini’s fatwa on this issue is reflective of our religion and it will never fade away. We urge organisers to cancel his address.”

“For many observers, this Catch-22 is the fittingly complex legacy of a woman nicknamed La Mamá Grande for her ferocious protection of her authors — she used to set up some of her most promising authors in Barcelona apartments, paying them salaries so they could write full-time — and her sometimes grandiose, “après moi, le déluge” style. Her agency was as much a cult of personality as an institution.”

“Bob Garfield and Mike Vuolo talk to Jesse Sheidlower, author of The F-Word, about a recent discovery about the history of one our most enduring expletives. (podcast)

“Why is that always the question fiction writers are asked? Why do readers insist on knowing if the story that held them enthralled was ‘real’? … Readers are nosy. People are nosy. Part of the question is simple nosiness. But only part.”

“Leslie Jamison and Charles McGrath discuss whether, 50 years after Sylvia Plath’s ‘Ariel’ was published, the confessional mode has been co-opted by the memoir.”

“Whenever society starts to think about, what does gender mean, what does sexuality mean, she’s just one of the names that comes up, and people start thinking about her, and talking about her, and portraying her all over again.”