Category: words

Said one of the scandalized young fellas, “the nature of Fun Home means that content that I might have consented to read in print now violates my conscience due to its pornographic nature.” Explained another, “I would [also] not have read the book if the pictures were of heterosexual intercourse.”

“He wants us to believe, in other words, that he was turned off by a handful of panels in a comic with thousands of them. Grasso’s vague word choice [in his larger argument] suggests that he knows how ridiculous this objection really is.”

Yes, there’s a Tumblr for them – the brainchild of Jez Burrows. “The best part, though, is how existentially moving these stories become. Burrows creates recipes (where he features the aforementioned gallons of blood) and poignantly moving confessionals that turn on their head with the last sentence.”

A newly published list of Amazon.co.uk’s biggest selling e-books of the year features psychological thrillers, misery memoirs, Mills and Boon and a book by the Tory MP Nadine Dorries, whose first work was memorably described by a Telegraph reviewer as “the worst novel I’ve read in 10 years”.

“Given that August is Women in Translation Month (or WITMO2015), we decided to put together a starter list of essential women writers in translation. Certainly it’s an incomplete list, but we did our best to take the long view” – all the way back to the 10th century.

Oh yes, it’s true. After all, “in much of Europe in the 1950s, socialists, people who called themselves ‘left’ – the very people whom many Americans thought no better than Communists – were about the only people who gave a damn about fighting Communism.” Consequently, “the CIA became a major player in intellectual life during the Cold War.”

The Open Book shop in Scotland’s ‘national book town’ of Wigtown has been listed on room-letting website AirBnB offering wordy holidaymakers the chance to work a 40-hour week selling books and customising the store with their ‘own stamp’.”

From “the bomb” to “holla” to the very short-lived “YOLO,” black slang words often go through the cycle of being used by black people, discovered by white people, and then effectively “killed” due to overuse and a general lack of understanding of how to use these words.

“At the [science fiction prizes’] presentation each August, the [winners] have been joined by … those of other ethnicities and genders and sexual orientations, many of whom want to tell stories about more than just spaceships. Early this year, that shift sparked a backlash: a campaign, organized by three white, male authors, that resulted in a final Hugo ballot dominated by mostly white, mostly male nominees.” But the final voting didn’t exactly work out as planned …

Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation is told from the point of view of an Algerian named Harun, the younger brother of the Arab man [Camus’s protagonist] Meursault killed. Meursault was a European who killed an Arab. Harun is an Arab who – we learn – killed a European. Harun’s first line? ‘Mama’s still alive today.'”