Category: words

Graham Swift: “Without getting pompous about it, fiction can perform a very important moral and social function. It is highly democratic.”

“If the definition of solipsism is ‘a theory holding that the self can know nothing but its own modifications and that the self is the only existent thing,’ then little pushes back against solipsism more forcefully than confession gone public. This kind of confession inevitably creates dialogue.”

“Ebooks have just left euphoria and are caught halfway between anxiety and decline and if nothing changes they may soon go the way of Betamax, Bebo and the Sinclair C5.”

“The library hasn’t selected an architect for the project, which will include traditional reading rooms and bookshelves. But officials said they also want to create fun, collaborative spaces, stocked with tools for creative projects. It hasn’t been decided whether these spaces would be located in the Schwarzman building, the branch across the street, or both.”

“[He] is known in the English-speaking world for his lyrical, densely descriptive novels, but as a journalist he was acerbically funny, charming, and slightly bizarre. The young García Márquez devoured what surrounded him. Everything was raw material for his newspaper columns – film adaptations of Faulkner, nudism, dancing bears, the letter X, a woman he saw in an ice cream parlor who may have been the ‘ugliest I’ve ever seen in my life, or, on the contrary, the most disconcertingly beautiful’.”

Joshua Ferris: “In book after book, Nabokov creates idiosyncratic, heightened, elaborately constructed worlds; Roth’s one book investigates and exhausts his world, the given world. When I was younger, I preferred Nabokov. … But you can’t choose what kind of writer you become; aesthetics is handmaiden to temperament. By dint of nativity, or culture, or epoch, or perspective, I was more temperamentally aligned with Roth.”

“Rap is indeed “real” poetry. It rhymes, often even internally. Its authors work hard on the lyrics. The subject matter is certainly artistically heightened, occasioning long-standing debates over whether the depictions of violence and misogyny in some of it are sincere. Rap, considered as a literature rather than its top-selling hits, addresses a wide-range of topics, even including science fiction. Rap is now decades old, having evolved over time and being increasingly curated by experts. In what sense is this not a “real” anything?”

“Hans Christian Andersen believed in an untouched innocence at the core of every person. … Innocence could be hidden and emerge, or it could be apparent and then corrupted. .. To be wholly innocent was rare. To be wholly innocent, for Andersen, meant to be wholly yourself. It meant that you were free from the distorted reality of the devil’s mirror.”

“Black literary writers with African roots (though some grew up elsewhere), mostly young cosmopolitans who write in English, are making a splash in the book world, especially in the United States. They are on best-seller lists, garner high profile reviews and win major awards, in America and in Britain.”