Category: words

“We took it upon ourselves to search the world for authors who have been called ‘the Chekhov’ of their country or, more endearingly in Cynthia Ozick’s characterization of Alice Munro, ‘our Chekhov.’ Chekhovs from Ireland, Canada, India, China, Mexico, The United States, Greece, Israel, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Japan have made the list so far, but we, as readers, are in perpetual search of the next Chekhov of X …”

“In a lucky coincidence that would not look out of place in a Charles Dickens novel, an antiquarian book dealer has stumbled across what is believed to be Dickens’s own personally annotated copy of a literary periodical he edited.” Literary Hub calls it “the Rosetta Stone of Victorian studies.”

“Jonathon Menjivar read On the Road as a teenager and, like so many American teens, was completely infatuated by it. His wife, fellow radio producer Hillary Frank, had never read it. They decided to read it together … Menjivar desperately wants her to see what he saw in it as a kid.” She doesn’t. (audio)

“When we perceive something new for the first time we cannot really perceive it because we lack the appropriate structure that allows us to perceive it. Our brain is like a lock maker that makes a lock whenever a key is deemed interesting enough. But when a key—for example, a new poem, or a new species of animal—is first met, there is no lock yet ready for such a key.”

Jane Ciabattari finds that early assessments of the “new” Harper Lee novel fall into five categories.

Stephen Goodwin: “One reviewer called To Kill a Mockingbird ‘that rare literary phenomenon, a Southern novel with no mildew on its magnolia leaves. Funny, happy, and written with unspectacular precision.’ In my eyes, that was exactly what was wrong with it.”

Philosopher and psychologist Riccardo Manzotti suggests that “our brain is like a lock maker that makes a lock whenever a key is deemed interesting enough. But when a key – for example, a new poem, or a new species of animal – is first met, there is no lock yet ready for such a key. … The next time we meet or perceive the object/key it will open the lock prepared for it in the brain.” Tim Parks unpacks the simile.

“It’s never a good idea to respond to bad reviews, and one tends to hold in high regard those authors — it always seems to be the already canonized ones, doesn’t it? — who meet bad reviews with such poise that you’re tempted to conclude that they didn’t even read them (but you know better).”

“The English language affects, distorts and restricts much of the current, and indeed some of the most celebrated, academic discussion. Human cognition is not as shrunken and similar as media-driven processes of globalization would suggest; the variation of human thought and expression is vast and remains capable of surprise.”

The enormously anticipated book is, after all, one that Harper Lee had refused for decades to publish (at least to the extent that she even remembered its existence as a distinct work). Claire Suddath traveled to Monroeville, Alabama to investigate, and to meet Lee’s attorney and de facto manager, Tonja Carter.