Category: words

Anne Enright, who’s up for a second Booker Prize right now and is the first-ever laureate for Irish fiction: “Writers are never telling wonderful stories about Ireland, they’re telling interesting stories about Ireland, and Ireland doesn’t necessarily appreciate that. So for me to be accepted, for a female voice – with all the anxiety there is about the female voice in Ireland – for that somehow to dissolve, and this symbolic thing of the laureateship, is just lovely.”

“New York Review Books, the publishing offshoot of the literary magazine The New York Review of Books, has made a specialty of rescuing and reviving all kinds of ignored or forgotten works in English or in translation, fiction and nonfiction, by writers renowned and obscure.”

Beverly Jenkins “says publishers liked her work, but couldn’t get their heads around a black historical novel that wasn’t based on slavery.”

“First, I’m surprised that so much of a speech that sounds like pure blather actually does form a few coherent sentences, albeit fractured and interrupted by other thoughts. Second, If you can locate the main clauses I’m talking about, you can see, graphically, how much weight they have to bear.”

Catherine Nichols: “Total data: George sent out 50 queries, and had his manuscript requested 17 times. He is eight and a half times better than me at writing the same book.”

“From the beginning, we knew that the manuscript was at best ‘recently rediscovered’, not new. It was always presented as a first draft of Mockingbird … And no buyer, even for the smallest and humblest of stores, was unaware of that when they ordered their own supply. The fact is that people wanted to read a new Harper Lee novel no matter what its provenance and no one truly wanted to get in the way of that.”

Phoebe Maltz Bovy considers the implications of the currently active hashtag #TenThingsNotToSayToAWriter.

“If we lament the decline of journalism, it is not because we want to remake magazines in the image of their forebears – pre-digital journalism was famously hostile to women, for one thing – it is because we want to inhabit a world where it is still possible to translate lived experience to the page with integrity. And if we didn’t find these acts of translation worthwhile, why would we bother to write articles – or plays – at all?”

“In February, IS torched more than 8,000 rare books and manuscripts in Mosul, Iraq’s second city, which the group seized in June, 2014. … The microfilm department overseeing the digitisation in Baghdad faces significant obstacles, as many books have been ruined by fire or dampness, while others have become hardened and petrified as a result of extreme heat and dampness.”

Says a statement from the independent Brilliant Books in Traverse City, Michigan, “It is disappointing and frankly shameful to see our noble industry parade and celebrate this as ‘Harper Lee’s New Novel’. This is pure exploitation of both literary fans and a beloved American classic (which we hope has not been irrevocably tainted).” In a Q&A, Brilliant Books owner Peter Makin explains the decision.