Category: words

“While it’s heartening to know that Harry’s doing well in his career as an Auror and that Viktor Krum is still going strong as Bulgaria’s Seeker, it begs the question anew of when exactly it’s time for a creator to walk away from their creation—and whether they really can these days.”

“The benefits of writing by hand, and doing so from a young age, are fundamental: improved and sustained development in social skills, hand-eye coordination, long-term memory. And when one considers “fluency” in its literal sense, it makes sense that cursive especially can energize a more fluid and coherent process of thought.”

The author of Cloud Atlas and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet “turns to the ‘diabolical treble-strapped textual straitjacket’ of Twitter for the first time to tell a new short story, ‘The Right Sort’. Mitchell will unveil his tale, about a boy tripping on his mother’s Valium pills, in Twitter’s 140-character bursts for the next seven days.”

“This past October, French lawmakers decided it was time to show Amazon who’s boss. Frustrated by Amazon’s fast and cheap book-selling model, which poses a threat to France’s healthy ecosystem of indie bookstores, politicians banded together to approve a bill that prohibited Jeff Bezos’ company and other online retailers from shipping discounted books for free.” Far be it from Amazon to break the law …

“While it is possible to create a do-it-yourself e-book, even those who have self-published their work do not recommend going it alone.”

“Fewer people than ever before are crosswording. And just because crosswords are slowly losing their crotchety clues doesn’t mean that solver demographics have changed.”

“As poets with performance backgrounds rise through the ranks of poetry print culture, American poetry appears caught between a fear of performance and a celebration of it. As these page + stage poets become more prominent in universities, journals, and reading series, are they helping to renew conversations about performance as an aspect of making poems?”

“Figures from the Author’s Licensing and Collecting Society show the median income of a working author last year was only £11,000, lower than the amount needed to live on, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, and down 29% since the last survey in 2005.”

“The worst: crazies, meth-heads. Anyone can walk into our bookstore in the age of meth — it’s a constant worry.”

“When you highlight books on your Kindle, when you highlight a sentence that you particularly like, Amazon is keeping track of that – I’m not sure everyone knows that – and Amazon records what five sentences in a book are the most commonly highlighted.”