Category: words

“Indeed, he used his writing to keep himself alive, to soothe himself when spinning out of control, and even to fuel his psychosis when he drifted into madness. Most of all, however, poetry kept him connected to others.”

“Vintage, a paperback imprint under Penguin Random House, has a catalog of almost 6,000 backlisted books. Nearly 4,900 of those have been converted into e-books. The publisher held off on publishing digital editions of Mr. Carver’s books because early e-book technology often mangled lines of poetry, mashing it into undifferentiated blocks of text.”

“Cutting-edge science now tells us ancient warriors would indeed consume vast vats of liquid opiates and a ferocious honey-mead, retsina and wine cocktail. There was cannibalism. Girls and boys did oil one another with rose and saffron-scented olive oil. Renault heard and smelt the ancient world many millennia after it had died and decades before it was resurrected by contemporary technology.”

“While there is nothing wrong with the books they have chosen, it seems they would have you believe that only white people are writing books worthy of summer reading.” (You can also find alternative summer reading lists for kids here.)

“My first novel has recently become an audiobook to which I will not listen. The characters have been assigned voices and accents and inflections that I’ll never hear.”

“With this foray into retailing, Mr. Kinney is joining a handful of authors who are injecting cash and a dose of literary celebrity into what seemed a dying trade.”

“After a lifetime of feeling that she never quite fitted into either India or the US, Lahiri feels a casa (‘at home’) in Rome. She recently wrote about her Italian metamorphosis in a ‘linguistic autobiography’, titled In Altre Parole (‘In Other Words’), which hit Italian bookstores in January.”

This year’s Hay festival, which kicked off on Thursday night, calls itself “a party that is first and foremost a party”. Twenty-seven years old now and with stars including Jude Law appearing alongside many excellent writers, Hay sits at the showbiz end of the spectrum.

“Many 19th-century newspapers are comprised primarily of content from other newspapers,” he said. “They were more aggregators than producers of original content. And often they were created by very small staffs, and scholars such as Ellen Gruber Garvey have shown that this aggregation is what allowed newspapers to spread as rapidly as they did in the 19th century, because you didn’t have to produce the whole thing.”

“Let’s be honest about the situation at lit mags: most are funded out of the editors’ pockets or else given a small budget from a university, most have unpaid editors (often MFA students getting a year’s experience), and most receive far more submissions than the editors could ever read. And if we are being really, really honest, most magazines don’t even have much of a readership, so no real way to raise money by charging readers.”