Well, reports are in: AbeBooks is reporting that “The Iliad: First Edition” has been the top search term since the Jennifer Lopez vehicle “The Boy Next Door” opened.
Category: words
Why Do People Relate To Characters Who Aren’t Real?
“Fiction offers many pleasures – we may enjoy its capacity to make the world anew for us through its descriptions, or to advance our understanding of science or philosophy through its application of ideas to examples of human behaviour, but although it does – on examination – seem so faint as to be numinous, nonetheless it’s our conviction that fictional characters’ hopes, fears and desires matter that allows fictions to become facts on the ground – a ground we sympathetically traverse alongside them.”
Crowdsourcing A Beloved Bookstore’s Minimum Wage Raise
“It occurred to Beatts that, to his customers, something like a membership might seem not only like an opportunity to help Borderlands but also like a genuine business transaction: they would be paying for the continued existence of what, to them, was an important gathering place.”
Read The New (Lost) Sherlock Holmes Story That Was Found In An Attic
“‘We’ve had enough of old romancists and the men of travel’, said the Editor, as he blue-pencilled his copy, and made arrangements for the great Saturday edition of the Bazaar Book. ‘We want something up-to-date. Why not have a word from “Sherlock Holmes”?'”
Writing Is Nothing Like A Dream Job, But It *Is* Like A Horror Film
“It plays havoc on relationships – because most writers are extreme introverts, who, when in the middle of a work, barely notice the rest of the world exists. When you are successful, you can quickly become vain and narcissistic. When you are not, depressed and despairing.”
The Crackdown On Little Free Libraries
“Alas, a subset of Americans are determined to regulate every last aspect of community life. Due to selection bias, they are overrepresented among local politicians and bureaucrats. And so they have power, despite their small-mindedness, inflexibility, and lack of common sense so extreme that they’ve taken to cracking down on Little Free Libraries, of all things.”
Before Goodreads And Twitter, We Had Marginalia For Insults And Epiphanies, And Cake
“The London Library’s copy of Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations, for example, contains such striking remarks — some clearly motivated by the text, some apparently not — as ‘What the devil does this mean?’ and ‘above all there should be cake.’ They were entered by T.S. Eliot.”
Kazuo Ishiguro’s New Novel Is About A Knight Slaying A Dragon (Wait, What?)
Yes, the author of The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go has written a book in which Sir Gawain, “now an old man responding – just like John Wayne in The Searchers or James Coburn in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid – to one last call to arms. ‘Dressed in rusted chainmail and mounted on a weary steed’, Gawain’s ‘sacred mission’ is to slay the she-dragon Querig.”
Why Zadie Smith Will Not Keep A Diary Ever
“I realize I don’t want any record of my days. I have the kind of brain that erases everything that passes, almost immediately, like that dustpan-and-brush dog in Disney’s Alice in Wonderland sweeping up the path as he progresses along it. I never know what I was doing on what date, or how old I was when this or that happened – and I like it that way.”
Those Who Stay: The Lives Of Writers’ Companions
“We often know very little about those who live closely and share the lives of the writers about whom we apparently know so much. Part of this is wilful mythologizing. We like to think of the writer as indestructible as the text, preferring not to imagine who might make them breakfast in the morning or help them put on their shoes when they are too old to manage it by themselves.” A look at “Miss Alice” Lee, Ted Hughes, John Bayley, Leonard Woolf, and Valerie Eliot.