Category: words

“The vehicle, a gorgeous 1975 Renault Estafette, has character, but the soul of this literary omnibus is its driver, Francisco Antolin. He’s a 36-year-old Lisboner who loves books and talking about them with whomever stops by.”

“Lots of people who are professionally writing about books are also snobs, and snobs to the point that they won’t even consider what the specific alchemy and magic is that makes something like 50 Shades of Grey save the book industry for a year.”

“[Paul] Moran has kept thousands of pieces of Updike’s garbage – a trove that he says includes photographs, discarded drafts of stories, canceled checks, White House invitations, Christmas cards, love letters, floppy disks, a Mickey Mouse flip book, and a pair of brown tasseled loafers. It is a collection he calls ‘the other John Updike archive,’ … and it raises fundamental questions about celebrity, privacy, and who ultimately determines the value and scope of an artist’s legacy.”

“In recent years, there has been an ‘Against [X]’ epidemic: against young-adult literature, against interpretation, against method, against theory, against epistemology, against happiness, against transparency, against ambience, against heterosexuality, against love, against exercise, etc. The form announces a polemic – probably a cranky one, and very likely an unfair one.” Exhibit A: Sontag’s “Against Interpretation,” from 1964.

“It’s not just reading that could be suffering, but writing too. As handwriting and cursive notebooks are replaced by iPads and laptops, educational development in students who are just beginning to read and write creatively could be negatively affected.”

“The supermarket chain Aldi has withdrawn Roald Dahl’s classic children’s book Revolting Rhymes from its Australian stores following a complaint on its Facebook page … that the book had ‘an unacceptable word in it for kids!!! Not ok!’.”

The UC-Berkeley professor and former MacArthur Fellow, “who served as poet laureate of the United States in the mid-1990s, and won a National Book Award in 2007 and a Pulitzer Prize in 2008, has now also won the Wallace Stevens Award, a $100,000 cash stipend given by the Academy of American Poets, an organization founded in 1934 to foster an appreciation for American poetry.”

“Superman made his debut in Action Comics #1, which cost 10 cents in 1938. Only around 50 unrestored originals are thought to have survived, and this was described as the most immaculate.”

“A German regulator handed Google Inc a victory on Friday as it said it would not pursue a complaint brought against the internet search engine operator by a group of publishers for giving users access to their news articles.”

“Last week, the actor, who signs his tweets ‘Hanx,’ released the ‘Hanx Writer,’ an iPad app that he helped to create with the company Hitcents. It simulates a typewriter keyboard – clacks, clangs, and all.”