“Since the scandal [over a near-universally-reviled article] broke on Thursday, Gawker has been having what can best be described as a nervous breakdown. What started as internal conflict over a journalism judgment call (or lack of one) has metastasized into an existential crisis about just, what, exactly, is Gawker? “
Category: words
The Couple Who Invented Nordic Noir
“Imagine a parallel universe in which Stieg Larsson and Jo Nesbø wrote gentle detective stories set in country houses and vicarages. This might well have been the world we’d be living in if, more than half a century ago, an eminent Swedish journalist called Per Wahlöö had not fallen in love with a young publisher named Maj Sjöwall.”
The Unemployed (And Terrifying) Life Of A Professional Writer
“The going gets tough. Then tougher. Now, with the essays just out, an illustrated children’s book forthcoming with a respected Ontario publisher, and a curriculum vitae a juror once described as being ‘as long as [her] arm,’ I’m facing poverty unlike anything I’ve known since the 1980s, when I lived with my little family in a low-income duplex.”
How Do People In Harper Lee’s Home State Feel About Go Set A Watchman?
“I mean, it is real as real. We all know these people, and we’ve all heard these things. You know, within family, friends, acquaintances, there’s nothing new in here.”
How A Great Editor Can Have A Profound Impact On A Great Author’s Work
Contrary to the myth that authors work best in lonely isolation, the truth is that editors or close advisers have often quietly shaped great books. The 20th century brought the rise of the professional, interventionist editor.
Venice Mayor Bans Children’s Books With Same-Sex Families; Italian Authors Say ‘Then Ban Us, Too’
Luigi Brugnano said, “At home parents can be called Dad One and Dad Two, but I have to think about the majority of families where there is a mother and a father.” 263 writers responded, “Kindly ban our books as well. We don’t want to stay in a city where the books of others are banned.”
The Most Parodied Poem In America Becomes A Twitter Meme
“William Carlos Williams: brilliant modernist, producer of snackable content, Twitter visionary before his time. Gah. Forgive me.”
‘Alice Is My Ideal Reader’ – ‘Reading Lolita In Tehran’ Author On (Re-)Reading Lewis Carroll
Azar Nafisi: “More than almost any other fictional character, Alice is in constant conversation with herself and others: probing, asking, reminding me of my infant daughter who would call out for me and, when I entered the room in the dim light of early morning, point to the objects around her and ask, ‘wassdis? wassdis?'”
How To Build A Better (More Compelling) Digital Book
“Created by the British novelist Kate Pullinger and British-Canadian multimedia artist Chris Joseph, Alice is a book that blinks, buzzes, hums, sings, jitterbugs, plays games, and, on occasion, rains and snows. Using her laptop, Fleming projected the first Alice story onto a library whiteboard … and her fifth-graders went nuts. The story was immersive like little else, the first piece of fiction that helped them see life through a character’s eyes.”
‘A Writer For Grown-Ups’: Richard Ford On Anton Chekhov
“As is true of many American readers who encountered Chekhov first in college, my experience with his stories was both abrupt and brief, and came too early. … Chekhov seems to me a writer for adults, his work becoming useful and also beautiful by attracting attention to mature feelings, to complicated human responses and small issues of moral choice within large, overarching dilemmas.”