“When I think of Angela’s Ashes, what I remember most is the way Hong Kong sounded and smelled. The air was muggy, winey, and fishy by late afternoon. Salt blew off the sea. My hostel smelled like cigarette smoke and old newspapers, and the curtains were always closed so that the place sat in a simmering, crowded gloom.”
Category: words
In Praise Of The Unlinked Story Collection
“I do not need a collection to feel ‘cohesive,’ nor do I spend too much time considering the order. Rather, what I adore is precisely the opposite: a rattling journey from plot to plot, from character to character, from idea to idea.”
How Can We Make Comics Better?
“As the faces on the pages popular comic books have steadily grown more diverse, the hiring practices of publishers haven’t necessarily kept pace.”
Ebooks Don’t Attract Much Piracy … Yet
“The biggest issue is still getting noticed … and I suppose the only thing worse than being pirated is not being pirated.”
Requests For Personal Advice, Gifts Of Cookies, Empty Chairs, And Someone Begging For David Sedaris’s Phone Number: Authors Tells Tales Of Book Tours
Junot Díaz, Gary Shteyngart, Nell Zink, Sloane Crosley, Tayari Jones, and John Scalzi recount memorable encounters.
Horton Hears A (New Dr. Seuss Book)
Through painstaking work and a meticulous, almost forensic reconstruction of Mr. Geisel’s creative process, those abandoned pages have yielded an unexpected new Dr. Seuss book, now called “What Pet Should I Get?” When Random House publishes it on Tuesday, with a first printing of one million copies, it will add a surprising coda to Dr. Seuss’ sizable canon.
Police Pull ‘American Psycho’ From Shelves In Australia
An Adelaide bookstore was raided following a complaint that the notorious Bret Easton Ellis novel didn’t have the sealed plastic cover required for all “restricted classification” titles (meaning for 18-and-older individuals only).
How Hard Is It To Translate Japanese Fiction Into English? Haruki Murakami’s Translator Will Tell You
Jay Rubin: “You don’t have a grammatical structure that you can use in any way, when translating Japanese to English. You don’t have cognates. You certainly don’t have a sentence structure that’s anything like English.” Not to mention the intangibles in each language that don’t exist in the other. “I very often feel I’m writing original – almost original – fiction.”
What Makes American English American? Stealing Words And Making Them Up, Mostly
“We have stolen words from other languages, massaged them into new words, turned nouns into verbs and verbs into nouns, and smushed two words together to make new ones.”
Why I Write (Or Not)
“I no longer regret writing, or the life I have made along the way. I’ve learned too much and come too far, and I am in pursuit of an art form. It took a long time, and a lot of work, to get to this point, and I will never find an end to it. I have a problem that can keep me busy for the rest of my life. I have something to look forward to.”