“As baby boomers approach their seventies and Alzheimer’s disease becomes increasingly commonplace, more and more fiction writers are attempting to reach into that obscure space. … Because the full, internal experience of Alzheimer’s is an account that fiction alone can deliver, … [this is a good time] to reassess the burgeoning genre and determine what its writers can and can’t tell us.”
Category: words
Jane Austen Used Pins To Edit Her Manuscripts
“Before the word processor, before Whiteout, before Post-It Notes, there were straight pins. Or, at least that’s what Jane Austen used to make edits in one of her rare manuscripts.” Have a look.
German Authors Join In Publishers’ Battle With Amazon
“Taking a page from their colleagues across the Atlantic, more than 1,000 writers from Germany, Austria and Switzerland have united to vent their frustration over the tactics Amazon is using against the Bonnier Group and the authors who are published under its name.”
Is This The Most Powerful Man In Publishing? (Some Would Say He’s Satan’s Top Lieutenant)
The Observer meets Amazon’s Russell Grandinetti.
The Library Is Ferguson, Missouri’s One Oasis Of Calm
“[The staff] has used Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to offer residents a place of respite for them to get bottled water, check their emails, and avoid the unrest developing on Ferguson’s streets.” (includes video)
Why Did Samuel Beckett Abandon His Mother Tongue (Only To Translate His Work Back Into It)?
Because he needed to. “It is becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for me to write an official English. And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothing-ness) behind it.”
Do The Particulars Of A Language Shape The Way Its Speakers Think? Try Translating Poetry To Find Out
Drew Calvert recounts the year he spent in an informal English-Chinese poetry study and translation group in Beijing – and what it taught him about the natures, strengths and deficits of the two tongues.
If We Can’t Censor Our Summer Reading List, We’ll Have No List At All, Says School Board
“The Cape Henlopen [Delaware] School Board nuked its entire summer reading list to keep kids from reading The Miseducation of Cameron Post, Emily M Danforth’s acclaimed YA novel about a gay teenager coming of age in Montana.”
The Power Of A Book To Counter And Reshape Narratives – Even Under The Nuns’ Keen Eyes
“To whom the book belonged remains a mystery, but in a sense it belonged to all of us convent girls in that sleepy town in southern Zimbabwe. We were having our eyes opened in more ways than one.”
The Year Science Fiction Turned Away From Older White Guys
“This was really a year that underscored that a younger generation of diverse writers are becoming central to the genre and helping to redefine and expand it.”