“We are made separate by the things we do or do not do. Responsibilities of all types curb us. Desire betrays us. No wound is ever truly petty. And there are so many ways to be locked apart from the rest of the world.”
Category: words
Picking The Wrong Day Job Can Ruin A Writer
“The main question no one wants to ask but everyone wants answered is quite simple: How are you supporting yourself? Is there a husband? A day job? A trust fund? If you write literary fiction, do you teach? If you’re in your 20s, do your parents pay your rent?”
The Words Used On Food Packaging Are Orwellian At Worst, Misleading At Best
“Food-packet rhetoric, like most advertising, is mainly in the business of selling nice feelings. Especially on-trend these days is an ersatz, kitschy friendliness. On a bar of chocolate, for example, the manufacturers boast that “we use only the finest quality organic beans from our friends in the Dominican Republic”. (Isn’t it nice that they are friends?)”
Dictionary Of American Regional English, Short Of Funding, Faces Shutdown
“DARE, as the dictionary is known, has announced that it will shutter most of its operations this summer unless it can find new sources of funding to cover its roughly $525,000 annual budget. The print dictionary had been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, among other sources. More recently, the budget was covered in large part by stopgap grants from the university, which are set to run out.”
E-Short Stories For 99 Cents, Just Like Singles From iTunes
“Vintage/Anchor Books is now experimenting with selling short stories à la carte, through its Vintage Shorts digital imprint. Throughout May, to mark Short Story Month, Vintage will release a digital short story each day for 99 cents, the price of many iTunes singles.” The range is wide, form Poe, Chekhov, and Cather to Alice Munro, Jhumpa Lahiri and Junot Diaz.
Data Analysis Of Literature Is Catching On (But It Reinforces The Need For Close Reading)
“Drawing on the techniques of intrinsic analysis of literary texts becomes all the more necessary if we are to keep from drowning in the sea of undifferentiated and undifferentiable data.”
Browsing In Bookstores And Then Buying Online Is A ‘Genteel Form Of Shoplifting’, Says David Nicholls
The author of One Day and Us also says, “the debate between digital and physical has had a kind of gladiatorial flavour … Cavaliers versus Roundheads, or perhaps more accurately, for someone of my age at least, Betamax versus VHS, with only one survivor allowed. All too often in this debate I’ve felt like the proud owner of a vast collection of Betamax.”
It Had To Happen: Author Of ‘So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed’ Gets Twitter-Shamed
And it was over a passage that didn’t even make it into the published version of the book. Laura Miller explains the what and how.
‘I Do Bad Sex Very Well. In Life And In The Novel Form’: Gary Shteyngart Interviews Adam Thirlwell
Thirlwell: “In [my novels] Politics and The Escape, these grand themes of history and politics were mischievously seen as equivalent to more apparently minor problems like sleeping arrangements in a threesome, or premature ejaculation.
Shteyngart: “But premature ejaculation and politics intersect quite a bit.”
Thirlwell: “Well that’s certainly true.”
Amazon And HarperCollins Finally Sign Truce, Er, Ebook Sales Agreement
“The agreement calls for HarperCollins to set the retail prices of its digital books, with incentives for HarperCollins to provide lower prices to consumers, according to a person familiar with the situation.” In other words, Amazon caved.