“Today, I get the sense that memory is much less sure of itself, engaged as it is in a constant struggle against amnesia and oblivion. This layer, this mass of oblivion that obscures everything, means we can only pick up fragments of the past, disconnected traces, fleeting and almost ungraspable human destinies. Yet it has to be the vocation of the novelist, when faced with this large blank page of oblivion, to make a few faded words visible again, like lost icebergs adrift on the surface of the ocean.”
Category: words
Mysterious Italian Author Reveals – A Little Bit
The novelist known as Elena Ferrante: “I didn’t choose anonymity. The books are signed. Instead, I chose absence. More than 20 years ago, I felt the burden of exposing myself in public, I wanted to detach myself from the finished story; I wanted the books to assert themselves without my patronage.”
Hachette Tries Selling Books Straight From Twitter (Take That, Amazon!)
“Hachette Book Group will start selling books straight from tweets, though it can’t be labeled more than an experiment for now: The publisher has partnered with digital distributor Gumroad to sell three gifty print books ‘for a limited time and in limited quantities’ via the books’ authors’ tweets.”
Are Humans Born With An “Instinct” For Language?
“How much sense does it make to call whatever inborn basis for language we might have an ‘instinct’? On reflection, not much.”
Is It Important To Save Dying Languages? (Of Course, But Not For The Reasons You Think)
“Certainly, a culture can thrive without its own language: No one would tell today’s American Indians that if they no longer spoke their ancestral language it would render them non-Indian. Likewise, being Jewish does not require speaking Hebrew or Yiddish. Yet because language is so central to being human, to have a language used only with certain other people is a powerful tool for connection and a sense of community.”
How Much Does It Matter That “In Cold Blood” Wasn’t 100 Percent Accurate?
Laura Miller looks at some recent controversy over Truman Capote’s account of a Kansas murder case and the relationship between crime fiction, true-crime narratives, and how Americans perceive the criminal justice system.
After 3000 Book Reviews Jonathan Yardley Calls It Quits At The Washington Post
“If anyone had told me as I began this long career that I would spend most of it as a book reviewer and that I would even write a few books of my own, I would have been astonished.”
It’s Easy – Too Easy? – To Write About Yourself
“The bot encourages you to communicate in emojis, but you can also add words. Everything you say is logged on your iPhone, and the idea is that if you’re diligent and reply every time it asks you what’s up, eventually you have yourself a journal.”
Can You Get Too Old To Write Poetry?
Donald Hall, former U.S. poet laureate: “It was gradual, and I had the sense of poetry fading on me, or me fading on poetry, for several years. And then I would think ‘No, this is good.’ And then six months later it wasn’t so good.”
No, England And Wales, You Damn Well Cannot Deny Books To Prisoners
“It is very hard to be both a reader and a villain. Reading helps you understand the world around you and relate to how your behaviour effects others. It should be encouraged as much as possible.”