Category: words

“The finding about reading aloud to children long after toddlerhood may come as a surprise to some parents who read books to children at bedtime when they were very young but then tapered off.”

“The club also underscores the scope of Zuckerberg’s wide-reaching ambition for Facebook as an unbundled, omnipresent force online”

So argues Noah Berlatsky: “‘Difficult,’ when applied to literature, generally refers to works that are hard to read, hard to get through, hard to finish. And for me, that describes Left Behind far more than it describes Atonement – the second of which I read twice in quick succession and would read again happily, while the first made me hate life and hope to be transported mid-sentence to another, better realm.”

“The website, named ‘Murakami-san no tokoro‘ or ‘Mr. Murakami’s place’ will solicit problems from fans of the surrealist, whose novels are published in dozens of languages around the world.”

Literary critics have become more subdued, adopting methods with less grand speculation, more empirical study, and more use of statistics or other data. They aim to read, describe, and mine data rather than make “interventions” of world-historical importance. Their methods include “surface reading,” “thin description,” “the new formalism,” “book history,” “distant reading,” “the new sociology.”

“The days when English shared the planet with thousands of other languages are numbered. A traveler to the future, a century from now, is likely to notice two things about the language landscape of Earth. One, there will be vastly fewer languages. Two, languages will often be less complicated than they are today—especially in how they are spoken as opposed to how they are written.”

“Mr. Wieseltier spent 31 years as the The New Republic‘s literary editor until his highly public ouster as a part of the magazine’s reinvention last December.”

“There are elements of the absurd about the plight of Kamel Daoud, an Algerian writer whose debut novel reaped glowing international reviews, literary honors and then, suddenly, demands for his public execution.”

“Neither hipsters nor Prufrock would exist without the modern urban setting that bred their sensibilities. It is in the city that the pulse of a civilization is taken.”