BBC Radio 4 announced that the historical fantasy would be read on the popular Book at Bedtime broadcast, and the folks who fussed when the story was published this fall have resumed fussing. Says Mantel, “You’d think they’d learn. I was bemused when Lord Bell suggested the police should interest themselves in the case of a fictional assassination of a person who was already dead.”
Category: words
If Today’s Languages Want To Survive, They’d Better Look To Egypt
“Whatever precautions we take against cultural annihilation, one intractable problem remains. There is a gorgeously convoluted name for those words that, in a given corpus, appear only once: hapax legomena.”
Are Print Books Back? And Was It Just A Rumor That They Were Going To Die?
“This is not the end of civilisation, but a sign of the times. Reading habits are changing worldwide. The consumer’s use of leisure time is no longer dominated by book-reading. That, says Daunt, means ‘we have to rethink what a good bookshop should be.'”
Book Publishers Need To Understand Fan Culture
“The online book world is about gathering around a book, or a love of books generally. As I’ve argued here before, for millions of us, the solitary act of reading becomes incredibly social in the digital spaces where we spend our time.”
With Hundreds Of Millions Of Dollars At Stake, Apple Would Like Ruling In E-book Pricefixing Overturned
“In Apple’s version of events, the company did ‘nothing more’ than ‘[hear] out’ the publishers’ complaints about Amazon and convey its ‘openness to pricing above $9.99.’ Nothing in the evidence, they stress, definitively shows otherwise.”
The Wikipedia Problem
“That it has survived almost 15 years and remained the top Google result for a vast number of searches is a testament to the impressive vision of founder Jimmy Wales and the devotion of its tens of thousands of volunteer editors. But beneath its reasonably serene surface, the website can be as ugly and bitter as 4chan and as mind-numbingly bureaucratic as a Kafka story. And it can be particularly unwelcoming to women.”
Australian Prime Minister Changes Jury’s Choice For Book Prize, Furor Ensues
The judges for this year’s Prime Minister’s Literary Award for fiction chose to give the $80,000 prize to Steven Carroll for A World of Other People. Then Tony Abbott stepped in (it’s his award, right?) to decree that Carroll should split the prize with Richard Flanagan for The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which had already won this year’s Man Booker Prize. This did not make many people happy.
Nigerian Federal Court Blocks Release Of Ex-President’s Memoir
A high court judge in Abuja ordered that Olusegun Obasanjo’s three-volume My Watch be withheld from the market due to a rather strange libel suit brought against Obasanjo by a Nigerian who figures in a very different memoir: Piper Kerman’s Orange Is the New Black.
The Most Controversial Novel In Israeli History Finally Hits U.S. Shelves
“In 1949, the publication of a short novel Khirbet Khizeh, about the forceful [sic] evacuation of a Palestinian village by Israeli soldiers, created a stir in the newly established state of Israel. Now, 65 years later, the controversial Hebrew classic by S. Yizhar is taking on a new life in English.”
Reading With A Pen In Your Hand – It Changes How You Read
“A pen is not a magic wand. The critical faculty is not conjured from nothing. But it was remarkable how many students improved their performance with this simple stratagem. There is something predatory, cruel even, about a pen suspended over a text.”