Category: words

“That essay Langston [Hughes] wrote, ‘The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain’ — I’m thinking of both sides of his argument in that. One is that obviously you’re always a black writer, but also you have to work with your gifts first and shut that out when you’re actually composing. What do you guys think? That’s how I approach it, but it might be naïve.”

“Seventy-five years ago on Sunday, writer William Carlos Williams helped inaugurate what would become this country’s most famous literary reading series, at New York’s 92nd Street Y Poetry Center.” (includes audio clips)

So how did “the balcony scene” (there is no balcony in the scene) in “Romeo and Juliet” become the most famous Shakespeare scene ever?

“She admits: ‘I’ve no problem in confessing that I’ve not had any time to read for the past two years. I read a lot of notes, a lot of legislative texts, news, AFP stories, but I read very little,’ squirming when it was noted that a culture minister might, well, enjoy partaking of a novel or two here or there.”

“The binary between children’s and adult fiction is a false one, based on a limited conception of the self.”

“There’s something really exciting about being in a bookshop when it’s dark and there’s no one else there, and it’s a bit out of bounds; like you’re an explorer and you’ve broken into a library.”

“Diaz said it was now up to Bronx residents to do their part to keep the store from leaving. ‘If you want a store to flourish and stay here in our borough, you have to petition with your wallets.'”

“We feel a social and professional pressure to respond to every tweet with our name on it, even if just to be nice, and it’s that very niceness that leads us down this road to bat-guano craziness.”

“This proliferation of the fantastic in contemporary fiction has at times been described as the “mainstreaming of science fiction”. But sci-fi continues on much as it ever has, producing various escapist fantasies for readers who want time out from reality. And of course there’s no shortage of purely realist novels populating Booker prize lists and elsewhere.”

“Roz Chast took the nonfiction prize with her graphic memoir, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?. The fiction prize went to Lily King for her novel Euphoria. The prize for young readers’ literature goes to Kate Samworth, author of Aviary Wonders Inc.”