Category: words

“The use of such devices ‘has unintended biological consequences that may adversely impact performance, health and safety,’ according to a research team led by neuroscientist Anne-Marie Chang of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.”

“For romance and mystery novelists who embraced digital technology, loved chatting up their fans and wrote really, really fast, the last few years have been a golden age. Fiction underwent a boom unseen since the postwar era, when seemingly every liberal arts major set his sights on the Great American Novel. Now, though, the world has more stories than it needs or wants to pay for.”

“I was very interested in the way that the past was just continually reinvented as new ideas of homosexuality came along. It left me interested in not just the gay past, but how we write about the gay past and how we claim it or deny it. That led straight into my novels.”

“The 21st century librarian will need to be more of a community impresario with digital and commercial expertise who can champion their communities’ needs and generate new business and audiences for the library.”

“We all read from different places, different backgrounds, and my meeting with Proust or Woolf, or Lydia Davis or J. M. Coetzee, will not be yours, nor should it be. On the other hand I do believe reading is an active skill, an art even, certainly not a question of passive absorption.”

“Mystery in White: A Christmas Crime Story by J Jefferson Farjeon is selling in “astonishing numbers”, according to the Waterstones book chain. It has outsold rival paperbacks Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn, and Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch on the high street, while Amazon temporarily ran out of stock last week due to surging demand.”

“Consider, for example, the common phrases that are typically exchanged in friendly greetings. How are you? How’s it going? How are you keeping? What’s up? In most cases we do not regard these questions, or the typical answers to them, as clichés; instead they are formulas, a stock of frozen expressions whose purpose probably has less to do with encoding information than with the maintenance of smooth relations. They are unoriginal, surely, perhaps overused, but certainly not ineffective.”

Favorite suggestions from David Mitchell, Jane Smiley, Claire Messud, William Gibson, Billy Collins, and other contributors to The Atlantic‘s “By Heart” series.

“For those able to plot their fictions at the start, craft is a kind of carpentry skill at erecting a literary structure. For those who feel out the story as they go, it’s more a handyman’s way with words.”

“The library’s Board of Trustees axed Galante on Wednesday after reviewing his expense accounts, which included charging more than $40,000 to his library credit card for food, alcohol and entertainment. Galante is still facing federal and city probes into how he managed library funds.”