Category: words

“Anton Szandor LaVey’s founding text of the Church of Satan, The Satanic Bible, survives in the broad popular consciousness, in part thanks to regular challenges by groups seeking to ban it … Very little effort needs to be expended by the Church to market itself, because it can piggyback on the defensiveness of the Christian American majority.”

“Explosive” is the word routinely used to describe the growth of M.F.A. programs in creative writing. Iowa was the first, established in 1936. By 1994, there were 64. By last year, that number had more than tripled, to 229 (and another 152 M.A. programs in creative writing), according to the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. Between 3,000 and 4,000 students a year graduate with the degree; this year, about 20,000 applications were sent out.

Leading the pack in attracting misguided outrage was Sherman Alexie’s young-adult title The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, followed by Marjane Satrapi’s girl-comes-of-age-in-Iran graphic memoir Persepolis and Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell’s And Tango Makes Three, about the same-sex pair of penguins who raised a chick at the Central Park Zoo.

“What lurks behind the literary landmarks of Victorian London? Fear? Joy? Ambiguity? In a new data mining project, a Stanford University research collective has sought to map the British capital’s ’emotional geography’ by categorizing what feelings or sensations common settings convey in the novels of Dickens, Thackeray, Austen and 738 [of their colleagues].”

“While science-fiction and fantasy fans have always enjoyed female authors such as Ursula Le Guin, Diana Wynne Jones and Ellen Kushner, Crisp believes the current swell in women writers is being led by a generation raised on Harry Potter and young adult fantasy fiction.”

Play on your tablet or phone as Sherlock, as the White Rabbit, as Mr. Crab in a fable from Nigeria – and experience books or folk tales in a new way. Or at least, that’s the hope.

“If you don’t know the poet’s original work, what are you reviewing? But when you whittle the already small pool of poetry critics down to those who are multilingual or translators themselves, the result is that hardly anyone reviews translations, and in turn fewer people read them. If nobody reads poetry, less than nobody reads international poetry.”

“During the years that she worked at Random House, she published books by Muhammad Ali, Henry Dumas, Angela Davis, Huey P. Newton, Toni Cade Bambara and Gayl Jones, whom she discovered in the 1970s. Jones’s manuscript was so impressive that when Morrison read it for the first time, uppermost in her mind, she once wrote, was ‘that no novel about any black woman could ever be the same after this.'” Oh, and then she started writing her own novels.

In the Beginning Was the Sea by Tomás González, “published in 1983 – by the owner of the nightclub where its author was then a barman – has been shortlisted alongside the work of international stars Haruki Murakami and Daniel Kehlmann for the 2015 Independent foreign fiction prize.”