Category: words

“Much has been said recently about the growth of world literature in the age of globalization, but this has overwhelmingly come from those writing in English and/or dealing with literatures in the Romance languages.”

Here is the thing about how discrimination works: No one ever comes right out and says, “We don’t want you.” In the publishing world, they don’t say, “We just don’t want your story.” They say, “We’re not sure you’re relatable” and “You don’t want to exclude anyone with your work.” They say, “We’re not sure who your audience is.”

The Journal‘s Speakeasy blog looks at the six contenders currently topping Ladbrokes’s list, five of whom have been mentioned for years and one – the current leader, as it happens – whose name will be unfamiliar to many of us.

“There has been ongoing debate at the company about what to do about the limit, a feature unique to Twitter that has created its own lingo and quirky style of brevity but has had its obvious constraints. Users have come up with workarounds to the character limitation by attaching screenshots of longer text or by linking tweets together in a so-called ‘tweetstorm.'”

“Twitter’s character limit is more than a pragmatic concern – it’s an aesthetic and cultural one, too, and it defines the tone and nature of the platform itself. Twitter is a thing constantly in motion, and changing the nature of the tweet will correspondingly change the nature of the tweetstream for the worse.”

For Craig Mod, it isn’t just the tactility of print books that matters (though he loves that quality): “The pile of unread books we have on our bedside tables is often referred to as a graveyard of good intentions. The list of unread books on our Kindles is more of a black hole of fleeting intentions.”

Michael Moynihan, the journalist who uncovered Jonah Lehrer’s inventions and copyings, lays out the case against Roberto Saviano’s ZeroZeroZero.

“We publish here for the first time T.S. Eliot’s review of two books by the English mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead … Foxy Grandpa was the title character of a popular American newspaper comic strip (1900-1918), in which Grandpa consistently outwitted his two trickster grandsons.”

As the art of pricing books rapidly dissipates, so does that of describing them evanesce.

“Julie Schumacher became the first female winner of The Thurber Prize For American Humor on Monday night, taking the prize for her epistolary novel Dear Committee Members. It was destined to be a historic night for the nearly 20-year-old award; all three of this year’s finalists were women.”