Category: words

“Poetry is just prose chopped up into lines. I mean this to be final, categorical, and no slight on poetry.”

“With a single poem, which says that her beloved Anactoria is more valuable than the splendor of any cavalry, infantry, or fleet, she created a tradition of ‘love-not-war’ lyrics whose future stretches from Propertius to Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Bruce Springsteen. As the definitive ur-voice of lyric ecstasy, she is so consequential that poets of every generation, from Catullus to Sylvia Plath and Anne Carson, have used her to define their aesthetic manifestos: among the ancients, only Homer can claim an instrumental role in literary history equivalent to Sappho’s.”

“I have written only one book about travel, concerning a journey across the Oman desert. I have written many books about place, which are nothing to do with movement, but many more about people and about history.” Here, she answers questions, some from readers, about her book Venice, her career, and her brushes with history.

“The local prosecutor wrote an urgent letter to its publishers trying to delay its release. Book sellers are taking orders for copies that wait in sealed boxes, ready to be opened on Tuesday. Some people are dreading its revelations about rape in their football-loving college town. Others are glad: Tell the story, they say, the louder the better.”

“The ‘memoir’ of a British war correspondent who purportedly committed rape, murder and other crimes before dying last year was initially written several years ago as a novel, it has emerged. Author Colin Carroll had described the novel in an interview more than five years ago with a local newspaper in Cork.”

“No writer wants to own the label ‘confessional’ anymore. It’s an epithet, with the same tenor as ‘hipster’ or ‘artisanal’: something for privileged narcissists who can’t see any of their own silliness. … And yet, the practice has deeply ancient, religious roots. Bruenig notes that it was designed not just to let the person who is confessing spill his or her guts, but also a sort of collective anecdote.”

For centuries, Chin P’ing Mei (The Plum in the Golden Vase) – a sprawling tale of the rise and fall of a corrupt merchant and his six wives, and only now available in a complete English version – “has been known in China as an ‘obscene book.’ Governments have banned it and parents have hidden it from children.” Yet, as a 17th-century critic put it, “anyone who says that Chin P’ing Mei is an obscene book has probably only taken the trouble to read the obscene passages.”

Anthony Doerr wins for “an imaginative and intricate novel inspired by the horrors of World War II and written in short, elegant chapters that explore human nature and the contradictory power of technology.”

“Four steel columns were required at Scarthin Books, in Cromford, Derbyshire, to support the weight of about 100,000 books. Thousands of pounds were raised within days of the appeal starting and it is now close to hitting a £10,000 target.”

“For centuries, if what you had written was going to be shown to others, it would have to be placed in a library, usually a church library. And since the only way anyone would know that a new piece of literature had been written was if the writer personally put the word around, there would usually be some kind of social connection between writer and readers.”