“Despite massive cuts to budgets and opening hours over the past few years, a third of the population uses libraries (50% in poorer areas). A fifth of people still don’t have the internet at home and more still don’t know how to use it.”
Category: words
New Book Collection Brings A Dizzying Array Of Indian Classical Literature To The Masses
“While the canon of surviving Greek and Roman classics is fairly small, the literature of India’s multiple classical languages includes thousands upon thousands of texts, many of which, as the writer William Dalrymple recently noted, exist only in manuscripts that are decaying before they can be translated or even cataloged.”
Are We In The Next Phase In E-Books?
“What is now being proven is that market is not infinitely elastic. Most of the data we see suggest that ebook sales growth has stopped. Ever-growing supply and stable demand is a toxic formula for the prospects of each successive ebook published for that market. My own hunch is that Kindle Unlimited is simply the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
Pulp Fiction – How Reading Was Democratized
“Editors at the old hardcover houses looked on paperbacks as a bottom-feeding commercial phenomenon, like the pulp magazines and comic books they were distributed with. Critics ignored them, or attacked them as a lowbrow and politically retrograde diversion. Religious and civic groups campaigned to get them regulated or banned.”
African And Black Writers Need To Liberate Themselves From “Mental Tyranny”, Says Ben Okri
The Nigerian novelist argues that “black and African writers are read for their novels about slavery, colonialism, poverty, civil wars, imprisonment, female circumcision – in short, for subjects that reflect the troubles of Africa and black people as perceived by the rest of the world. They are defined by their subjects. The black and African writer is expected to write about certain things, and if they don’t they are seen as irrelevant.”
African And Black Writers Need No Instructions From Ben Okri On Liberating Their Minds And Their Subject Matter
Somali-American literary scholar Sofia Samatar: “It’s beyond depressing to hear a writer of Okri’s stature, who himself writes powerfully about overwhelming subjects, board this broken-down train. … If, as Okri insists, ‘we must not let anyone define what we write’, why should black and African writers listen to Ben Okri? The essay’s demands and commands make it impossible to read as the expression of a quest for freedom.”
Annie Proulx Wishes She’d Never Written “Brokeback Mountain”
“I wish I’d never written the story. It’s just been the cause of hassle and problems and irritation since the film came out. … One of the reasons we keep the gates locked here is that a lot of men have decided that the story should have had a happy ending. They can’t bear the way it ends – they just can’t stand it.”
Hilary Mantel Writes About Grief
“Grief is like fear in the way it gnaws the gut. Your mind is on a short tether, turning round and round. You fear to focus on your grief but cannot concentrate on anything else. You look with incredulity at those going about their ordinary lives. … Your former life still seems to exist, but you can’t get back to it; there is a glimpse in dreams of those peacock lawns and fountains, but you’re fenced out, and each morning you wake up to the loss over again.”
“Literally” And “Awesome” Aren’t Destroying English, Steven Pinker Reassures Us
In a Q&A, the cognitive scientist and linguist talks about rules of usage (and lack of them), the usefulness of emojis and italics, and his grammar feud with The New Yorker‘s Nathan Heller. He even explains the psychology that keeps grad students churning out academic jargon instead of decent writing. (And then there’s the hair …)
Gender And Writing, Blah Blah Blah – But Yes, It’s Still Important
“Everyone is shaped by their experience of gender, whatever that experience is; there is no view from nowhere. Men’s experience is no less specific than women’s; it’s just that we fail to see it as such.”