“Thirteen years after it opened, the literature on the US detention camp at Guantanamo Bay has become extensive. There are works of journalism, collections of documents, scholarly analyses, novels and some searing memoirs, such as those by the former detainees Ahmed Errachidi and Moazzam Begg. But there has never been a book quite like this: an account by a prisoner, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, of his abduction, rendition and sustained torture, composed inside Guantanamo’s concentric layers of concrete and razor wire.”
Category: words
How Can You Tell If An Author Is Being “Authentic”?
“Tackling an author who is new to us, it can be hard to tell whether the work is authentic or not. In which case, best to enjoy the perplexity of not quite knowing how serious our author is, weighing the arguments on both sides, reading another novel to see how it fits. This is part of the fun of reading, too, the attempt to get one’s mind round the work, accepting a long game played out over three, four, five books.”
The Universal Language Of Science Is English. Should It Be?
“This point is much easier to sustain if the speaker grew up speaking English, but the majority of scientists working today are actually not native English speakers. When you consider the time spent by them on language-learning, the English-language conquest is not more efficient than polyglot science – it is just differently inefficient.”
Is Harper Lee’s “Go Set A Watchman” A Sequel, Or What? The Publisher Explains
Jonathan Burnham of HarperCollins: “It’s set 20 years after the events of To Kill a Mockingbird, … during the mid-1950s during a turbulent time in American racial politics. … In a way, it’s a pre-sequel, if that could exist. None of the material from Go Set A Watchman can be found in To Kill A Mockingbird. All the scenes are new. The writing is new. … It’s in every respect a different novel.”
The Common Core Has Not Killed Literature
“The Common Core language-arts and literacy standards call for ‘a true balance of informational and literary texts.’ Many teachers and administrators misinterpret that. They immediately focus on the shift to nonfiction texts and forget the ‘balance.’ There’s nothing in the standards about Ponyboy, but I certainly see how I could use him, with some nonfiction and multimedia texts about gangs, to give my kids a rigorous learning experience. And that’s my choice.”
Milan Kundera’s First Novel In 13 Years Is On The Way
“Faber will release Kundera’s The Festival of Insignificance, translated from the original French by Linda Asher, on 18 June. The short work was first published in Italy in 2013, and has since topped charts in Italy, Spain and France. … The US edition will be released by HarperCollins on 23 June.”
The Long Wait: Harper Lee To Publish Second Novel
The recently discovered book, titled “Go Set a Watchman,” was completed in the mid-1950s, in the midst of the civil rights movement. It takes place 20 years after “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Though it’s effectively a sequel, Ms. Lee actually wrote “Go Set a Watchman” first.
Academic Publishing Is Being Disrupted. Now What?
Time-honored traditions appear vulnerable to overhaul or even extinction. Sarah Thomas, vice president for the Harvard Library and Larsen librarian for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, says, “We are still in the Wild West of sorting out how we will communicate our academic developments effectively.”
A Brief History Of Loving To Read
“For a long time, people didn’t love literature. They read with their heads, not their hearts (or at least they thought they did), and they were unnerved by the idea of readers becoming emotionally attached to books and writers. It was only over time, Lynch writes – over the century roughly between 1750 and 1850 – that reading became a ‘private and passional’ activity, as opposed to a ‘rational, civic-minded’ one.”
Anton Chekhov Wrote The Best Work Of Journalism Of The 19th Century
Akhil Sharma on Sakhalin Island, an account of life in prison camps in that isolated spot off Siberia’s Pacific coast: “The fact that so few people know of the book, and that among Western critics (not necessarily Russian ones) it is considered a minor masterpiece instead of a major one … has something to do with how journalism is rarely considered literature. But it has even more to do with the lies that Chekhov told to get access to the prison colony.”