Category: words

Consider not only David Foster Wallace, the great virtuoso/victim of the format, but also Chuck Klosterman, Mark Z. Danielewski, Jenny Boully, and the great father of the footnote as literary device, Vladimir Nabokov.

There was one part of the job that he dreaded above all others …

Over the years the Scripps Spelling Bee has become a greater part of the nation’s pop culture. Much of this can be attributed to ESPN’s quasi-sporting-event coverage of the competition, which this year began with the slam poet J.Ivy delivering a spoken-word presentation about the allure of the bee.

“British musician Jonathan Goddard is attempting to inspire primary schoolchildren to learn Latin. He ‘approaches each lesson like a concert’ in his work for the Latin Programme charity which combines the teaching of classical Latin with modern English grammar and vocabulary.” (audio)

“This is very much a patriarchal society. And I think one way of keeping women less well paid and having to do more work is to mock them and anything they love.”

“Blume’s career spans more than 40 years of writing groundbreaking YA novels that delved deep into the minds of women, tackling intimate subjects such as teenage sex, menstruation and masturbation. But with her new novel, In the Unlikely Event, Blume has tackled a new frontier – this is her first crack at historical fiction.”

“There were some instances where, when we were planning panels — Who’s available? Who fits with kind of the theme of this panel? — where we would definitely stop and say, ‘We need diversity included here. We have three white people; the fourth cannot be that way.'”

“The Toronto-based Man Booker Prize winner is the first author to hand over an unpublished piece to the Future Library in Oslo. The international project will see one writer contribute a new, unread text to the collection every year for the next 100 years. The pieces will be kept locked up until 2114, when 1,000 trees planted for the project in a forest just outside Oslo will be cut down to provide paper for their publication.”

“Over all, the writers’ incomes from writing have dropped 27 per cent since the last time they were surveyed, in 1998. Their average annual income from writing is now less than $13,000 and half report they are working harder than before to make the money. American and British surveys have reported similar drops.”