“Shukri al-Mabkhout’s award comes just a week after his publishers learned from an Abu Dhabi bookshop that the novel was banned from bookshops across the Emirates. ‘The Italian’ is the eighth winner of the $50,000 (£33,000) prize known as the “Arabic Booker”.
Category: words
Why Is It So Difficult To Make A Good Film About Writing?
“One of the main problems with films about writers is that the films are too often very inarticulate when talking about books.”
The Keeper Of The Grammar
“‘Whom’ may indeed be on the way out”, she writes, “but so is Venice, and we still like to go there.”
Cache Of Mark Twain Newspaper Stories From San Francisco Uncovered
“His topics range from San Francisco police – who at one point attempted, unsuccessfully, to sue Twain for comparing their chief to a dog chasing its tail to impress its mistress – to mining accidents.”
Read Some Of Mark Twain’s Rediscovered San Francisco Columns
To an editor about a previous story: “Please publish it again, and put it in the parentheses where I have marked them, so that people who read with wretched carelessness may know to a dead moral certainty when I am referring to Chief Burke, and also know to an equally dead moral certainty when I am referring to the dog.”
Alice Notley Wins $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize
“Notley, who now lives in Paris, … has published more than 30 books, beginning in 1971 with 165 Meeting House Lane and continuing with two new volumes due this year, Certain Magical Acts and Benediction.”
What Do We See In Our Minds As We Read? And What Don’t We See?
Many readers know – or think they know – the answer to that question. “The problem is that upon close examination the reading experience is far more complex and far less visual than is commonly supposed.”
Before You Start: A Look At Introductions, Forewords, and Prefaces
Nick Ripatrazone considers some classic examples of the genre(s), from Walker Percy’s foreword to A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole to Graham Greene’s own preface to The Comedians (framed as a letter to his editor) and Jack Kerouac’s intro-in-the-form-of-a-questionnaire to Lonesome Traveler.
How Virginia Woolf Brought Her Mother Back To Life
Christopher Frizzelle looks at the miracle(s) the author worked in To the Lighthouse.
Rare Garcia Marquez Book Stolen From Colombian Book Fair
“The first edition is one of only 8,000 copies published in 1967 by an Argentine editorial house, Sudamericana, and a signed copy like the one stolen in Bogota can command as much as $23,000 online.”