“There are obvious security challenges in organising a literary festival in a country where people get killed for the things they write. … [Yet] the Karachi literature festival (KLF) is now in its sixth year, and welcomed more than 100,000 people through its security scanners last weekend.”
Category: words
And Now Random House Will Introduce | An Unpublished Book By Dr. Seuss!
“The manuscript had been in a box that was discovered in the home of Dr. Seuss (otherwise known as Theodore Geisel) in the La Jolla section of San Diego, shortly after his death in 1991, and set aside. In 2013, Mr. Geisel’s widow, Audrey, and longtime secretary and friend, Claudia Prescott, went through the box and found the nearly complete manuscript, along with other unpublished work.”
Wonder Woman Wins A History Book Prize
“America’s favorite female superhero has a new medal to pin on her Stars-and-Stripes bustier, thanks to the New-York Historical Society, which has awarded its annual American History Book Prize to Jill Lepore’s best-selling The Secret History of Wonder Woman.”
Sure Our Alphabet Is Our Alphabet (But All That Could Be Changing)
The power to spread and transform the alphabet — once concentrated among medieval scribes, British and French printers, or Christian missionaries spreading words to spread the Word — has been democratized. Now with tablets and smartphones, “the smallest building blocks of the shared written language (i.e. print) are more in your hands . . . than they have ever been.”
Princeton Gets $300 Million Donation Of Rare Books
“Highlights of the collection include a Gutenberg Bible, a first printing of the Declaration of Independence, a run of Shakespeare folio editions, and important autograph manuscripts by Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart.”
What Made Philip Levine’s Poetry Extraordinary
“Della and Tatum, Sweet Pea and Packy, Ida and Cal. You met a lot of unpretentious people in Philip Levine’s spare, ironic poems of the industrial heartland. … Mr. Levine’s death is a serious blow for American poetry, in part because he so vividly evoked the drudgery and hardships of working-class life in America, and in part because this didn’t pull his poetry down into brackishness.”
Sorry, Literary Fiction Establishment: Fantasy Is Excellent For The Brain
“The research suggests fantasy stories — or at least those good enough to hold our interest — produce neural reactions that are above and beyond those created by other narratives — even ones that are just as exciting, involving, or humorous.”
How Do You Get Untold American Stories Out To The Masses? Graphic Novels, Of Course
“Some man or woman in Louisiana deciding that, ‘The only way I’m going to be able to get up in the morning and go to do what I need to do, is to run. And to run thousands of mile barefooted through snow and ice with only a river and stars and spirituals to guide me’ — that’s an American idea.”
Chasing The Elusive Inspiration Of Dead Writers’ Lives And Travels
“What does this movement in travel writing bear for the genre as a whole? What can the graves of dead poets in Venice, a boat ride down the Amazon to the coast of Brazil, or a visit to the homes of D. H. Lawrence and George Eliot tell us about life, about living?”
Jonathan Franzen Is The Book Internet’s Favorite Villain For A Reason
“This idea Franzen posits that literature teaches us you’re not the ‘heroic figure you think of yourself as, that you might be the very dubious figure that other people think of you as’ is as deeply embedded in many big YA novels as it is in Munro stories. To say these books are simplistic is to mistake grandness, ease of narrative, and breathless pace for mere shallowness.”