… Well, you’ll just have to click to find out, but there’s a hint in the photo at left. (includes runners-up)
Category: words
Good Grammar Is Important. But Some Of These Rules Make No Sense…
Plenty of scientific linguists have debunked the sillier rules espoused by language pedants – those proscribing split infinitives, ending a sentence on a preposition, and so on. But Steven Pinker wants to go beyond that, “to offer guidance, based in evidence from actual use of language, for how people can improve their prose without recycling these superstitions”.
Thomas King Wins Canada’s Governor General’s Award For Fiction
“King had twice previously been a finalist: A Coyote Columbus Story was nominated in the children’s literature category in 1992, while his novel Green Grass, Running Water was nominated for the fiction prize the following year.”
Death Of The Literary Feud?
“Writers today are less likely to engage in open antagonism because the political risks are too great. Between trolls on Twitter, libel law and the pressures of political correctness, writers no longer dare to insult their rivals in the hyperbolically abusive terms that Mailer and Vidal favoured.”
Bring Back The National Book Award For Translation!
“The National Book Foundation should revive an award it should never have abandoned in the first place – an award that recognizes a category of books unusually sensitive to precisely this kind of recognition.”
Salvador Dalí’s Erotic Cookbook
“The book’s contents range from discussions of the grotesque shapelessness and immorality of spinach to the masterful tool that is the human jaw. Recipes include exotic and experimental eats like Thousand Year Old Eggs, Crayfish Consomme and Conger of the Rising Sun (which is an eel).”
The Obsession With ‘Writers Under 40’ Is Bizarre, At Best (And Flat-Out Stupid To Boot)
“Is writing a beauty contest? Is it a sports competition? Beauty, and sporting achievement might be associated, in our culture, with youth (and, even that’s not a given) but there’s no reason this should go for the written word too.”
The Winner Of The Giller Prize On Music, Writing, And Unicorns
“I like to sometimes write against the music I’m listening to. So if I’m writing a peaceful, quiet, sad scene, there’s something useful about listening to really assertive, loud music, to find a tension.”
The Celebrated New Science Fiction Writer Suddenly Exposed As A Longtime, Vicious Troll
“In outing and rushing to condemn Sriduangkaew, are sci-fi fans perpetuating a sexist, even racist double standard? Or are minority voices, on the contrary, so prized in sci-fi/fantasy publishing that their fans will go to any lengths to excuse them?”
“Bonfire Of The Inanities”: The Awl Has At The New York Times Styles Section
“Like a marathon watching of Sex and the City, a sustained reading of Styles reveals more about both the culture and New York City than you might think from a look at a single issue. … The Styles section may well be pretty stupid sometimes. It’s also a richer and more complex entity than any of us would like to believe.”