Category: words

A new project is using crowdsourced translation to provide subtitles for popular films and television programs in such tongues as Cherokee, Maori, and Basque.

“Objections were raised to Pulitzer winner David Shipler’s non-fiction title The Working Poor, because it includes a reference to a woman who was sexually abused as a child and had an abortion. Narrated by a dog, Garth Stein’s The Art of Racing in the Rain was criticised for a sex scene, and Alexie’s award-winning novel for its strong language. Also suspended were Jeannette Walls’s memoir The Glass Castle and Hermann Hesse’s classic novel Siddhartha.”

“[They] are incurious about the logic and history of the English language and … have a tin ear for its nuances of meaning and emphasis. Too lazy to crack open a dictionary, they are led by gut feeling and intuition rather than attention to careful scholarship. … In their zeal to purify usage and safeguard the language, they have made it difficult to think clearly about felicity in expression and have muddied the task of explaining the art of writing.”

“Somehow, ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’ by Thomas Piketty has become a conversation piece among well-read people. Its graphic red-and-ivory cover is inescapable. Early in its launch, it hit No 1 on Amazon’s bestseller list and the paper version – a doorstop in punishing, heavy hardcover – sold out in major bookstores.”

“Vintage Books will release nine of García Márquez’s works as e-books on October 15th, marking the first time his books will be available digitally in the United States.” Not included are One Hundred Years of Solitude and No One Writes to the Colonel, which are published by HarperCollins.

“You drink in a way that is simple and direct and not at all in imitation of Hemingway or Carver, and if it is then it’s an homage, a subtle, searingly thought-provoking homage, and the bartender is a charming old gent who calls you ‘hoss’ and not a college girl with a swallow tattoo on her breastbone.”

“In her story she imagines she is two someone elses – an IRA hit man and a seemingly ordinary woman with a fatally good view. These unlikely allies conspire to kill the prime minister. The writer succeeds where terrorists failed.”

Hilary Mantel: “I think it would be unconscionable to say this is too dark; we can’t examine it. We can’t be running away from history. We have to face it head on, because the repercussions of Mrs. Thatcher’s reign have fed the nation. It is still resonating.”

“Whether Wharton herself ever noticed the parallel is lost to history, but, from our current vantage point, Woolf’s breezy dismissal of American authors, including Wharton — ‘they do not give us anything we have not got already’ — seems, at best, questionable.”

“The idea that pleasure should be relegated to adolescence seems a dreary recipe for adulthood indeed, but whose pleasure, exactly, are we discussing here? What of people who have been persecuted solely on the basis of their pleasures, for daring to be joyful in bodies regulated and punished for those pleasures by the apparatus of the state?”