Category: words

“Discouraging, isn’t it? It’s just a fact that there are never very many poets around at any given time. I think poetry is always one or two poets away from extinction anyway. “

“The story of how this beloved series came to be has drawn great interest in recent years, as critics have debated Rose Wilde Lane’s role: How much of the “Little House” books did she revise or even write herself? Lane always insisted that she merely edited them; she didn’t believe there was much prestige in “juveniles.” At the same time, her diaries and letters reveal an intense and entwined relationship, and writing mentorship, between daughter and mother.”

Ben Okri won the Booker in 1991 for The Famished Road and has received, among other prizes, the Commonwealth Writers’ prize, the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction and the Guardian Fiction prize. Unable to attend, he issued a terse and less than ecstatic statement: “A writer writes what they write and that’s all there is to it.”

When Guy Vidra came to the magazine in October, he told the staff that “there were peacetime chief executives and wartime chief executives, and he was the latter. He added, using a profanity, that he planned to break stuff.”

Here’s one sample from her series of tweets: “I never complain about this shit, but there are MANY books on that notable list with reviews that were NOWHERE near as good as mine.” (includes rant and subsequent self-justification on Facebook)

“Barnes & Noble said on Thursday that it had reached a deal with Microsoft to buy back its stake in the Nook division, which the bookseller is planning to split off into a separate, publicly traded company at some point before August.”

“The vlogger’s book Girl Online has become the fastest selling debut novel since records began. She tweeted she was “blown away” after more than 78,000 copies were picked up in its first week. That’s more than Harry Potter author JK Rowling and EL James, who wrote 50 Shades of Grey, achieved with their debuts.”

“The novel form isn’t the reason so much contemporary fiction seems uninspired; for that, we’d do better to consider other causes, of which there are plenty: an emphasis on documenting social conditions and modernity over the study of individual characters, a post-Freudian tendency to lean on secondhand psychoanalytic ideas as a cover for incomprehension or shallowness, a corrosive commitment to niceness at the expense of the kind of social and moral judgments that used to be at the novel’s center, MFA programs, to name just a few possibilities.”

“If wide notice is taken of a current spat over what we can read about Shakespeare’s sexuality into the sonnets in the correspondence columns of the Times Literary Supplement, Sonnet 20 may be a future favourite at civil unions. “

“Affect a lisp, assume a lilt, and add a fair amount of flamboyance. Presto! Instant gay man’s voice. It’s a stereotype, to be sure, but is there any truth to it? Bob Garfield and Mike Vuolo talk to Benjamin Munson, a speech scientist at the University of Minnesota, about what it means to sound gay.” (podcast)