Category: words

“2013 saw the highest number of translations since it started counting in 2008 – more than 500 books from some 187 publishers. What’s driving this increase?”

Dan Kois: “Ready to explain how you CODDLE WRITERS, Laura?”
Laura Helmuth: “Hello, Kois. Have you made anybody cry today?”

Jessa “Bookslut” Crispin considers the reasons that ghostwriters’ clients want to be seen as authors in the first place, why the ghostwriters themselves will do the job, and why the reading public calmly accepts the arrangements.

It goes far beyond Oedipus complex, Freudian slip, and id – to father surrogate, sublimation, libido, character trait, and beyond. (We’ll leave aside parapraxis. And don’t even start about you-know-what envy.)

“I have a building idea for you; it’s totally fully formed in my mind already, but I just don’t have the time to build it myself. Can I tell you about it for your next building?”

“Not Pulitzer Prize-winning Junot Diaz, who also won a James Beard award for one of the finest pieces of food writing I’ve ever read. Not the doña of Chicano literature, Sandra Cisneros. Not best-selling author Luis Alberto Urrea. Not Tex-Mex loco Dagoberto Gilb. Not any other number of Latino authors who could easily contribute a story or two that would be appicable a Mexican-food chain. Judd Apatow made the list–but not one Latino.”

Buy a lot of them, and hand them out: “First Book stepped out with a campaign called Stories for All, where we have guaranteed that we will buy 10,000 copies of the titles we select.”

“The parochial world of literary fiction tends to deal with mass-media franchises in the same way it deals with genre fiction, comics and the other narrative arts that eclipse it by magnitudes for size, influence and profit margins: by giving them the silent treatment. This isn’t an entirely stupid strategy.”

Psycholinguists have actually categorized words usually thought of as superfluous blips in speech into separate groups based on their function. “Um” and “uh” are known as “filled pauses.” “You know,” “I mean,” and “like” are termed “discourse markers.”

“From the moment Limbaugh’s nomination was announced, in March, conservatives were delighted, liberals angered and others simply puzzled — emotions only amplified by Limbaugh’s victory, which raised his book from No. 71 on Amazon the day before to the top 10 Thursday.”