“The Library, subject of a 1941 Borges story by the same name, contains all possible combinations of letters, and is tended to by melancholy Librarians trying in vain to locate meaning within the nonsense. … If that sounds like a less-than-appealing place to spend your time – not to mention a logically impossible one – keep your rational, unfevered brain away from libraryofbabel.info, where Brooklyn-based writer and coder Jonathan Basile has set out to bring Borges’ dream/nightmare to life.”
Category: words
The Most Successful Literary Couple In The U.S.
“The emergence of street lit is one of the big stories in recent American publishing, a juggernaut that has generated huge sales by catering to a readership — young, black and, for the most part, female — that historically has been ill-served by the book business. But the genre is also widely maligned.”
The Newest Hot Literary Journal Is … United Airlines’ In-Flight Magazine?
“As airlines try to distinguish their high-end service with luxuries like private sleeping chambers, showers, butler service and meals from five-star chefs, United Airlines is offering a loftier, more cerebral amenity to its first-class and business-class passengers: elegant prose by prominent novelists.”
The Danger Of A Single Story About ‘Africa,’ According To One Of The Continent’s Best Novelists
“Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the best-selling Nigerian author, wants American readers to know that African writers don’t just write about Africa’s problems. … Though it might seem obvious to point out, she adds, ‘people are diverse, and there are different things that are going on with them.'”
The Main Problems With This Plan About Giving Ebooks To Poor Kids
“Publishers aren’t giving kids a quarter of a billion dollars’ worth of free books. They’re free e-books. Which require two things: A good Internet connection — at least at school if not at home — and some sort of device to read them. And that’s a challenge.”
Salman Rushdie Vs. Francine Prose – Chapter 459 Of The Charlie Hebdo Wars
Rushdie: “Our fellow artists were murdered for their ideas and you won’t stand up for them … I hope that our long alliance can survive this. But I fear some old friendships will break on this wheel.”
Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” Is Being Removed From Russian Bookstores
The worry, ostensibly, is that the swastika on the book’s cover might violate the law passed last December that forbids spreading “Nazi propaganda.”
How Did Storytelling Become So Devalued In “Good” Writing?
“Valuing the importance of the story is still considered unambitious, as though anyone could do it. I suspect the opposite: it is because writing a good story is so hard that it is such a tempting target, to be dismissed as a lower, populist skill. In the absence of a capacity, posit a principle.”
Hahaha, Heehee, Heh – How We Spell Laughter In Texts And Emails
Sarah Larson: “The terms of e-laughter – ‘ha ha,’ ‘ho ho,’ ‘hee hee,’ ‘heh’ – are implicitly understood by just about everybody. But, in recent years, there’s been an increasingly popular newcomer: ‘hehe.’ Not surprisingly, it’s being foisted upon us by youth. What does it mean?”
Why Trollope Is Trending: He’s Still The Novelist For The Way We Live Now
Adam Gopnik: “Words change meaning over time, and the quality of irony that we value today is omnipresent in Trollope – and that is the habit of turning objects and values upside down, of seeing big and little inverted.”