Category: words

For a start, War and Peace isn’t as heavy to schlep around on an iPhone. But there’s also the growing phenomenon of “interstitial reading”.

“No one would dream of telling an adult that novels offer a better experience than history or biography. So why do we do this with children?”

“‘Poetry makes nothing happen,’ William Butler Yeats once wrote. But then he never got a chance to read ‘In Praise of Air,’ a poem by Simon Armitage just installed on a building along a busy road at the University of Sheffield, England, and billed as the world’s first bit of air-cleansing verse.”

It all started when Foer was eating at Chipotle one day and found that he had nothing to read. (includes stories by Foer, Morrison, and Michael Lewis)

“Behold the book tour, which is an ordeal for many writers. They stand alone on a stage quaking and exposed, prepared to offer the world the results of years of hard labor, perhaps only to find that their audience consists entirely of family members.”

The regional government of Calabria (the toe of the boot) has passed a law allowing a prisoner to have his sentence reduced by three days for each book he reads, up to 16 books per year.

“French publishers seem to have assumed that the market in the French-speaking world [beyond the hexagon] would never develop, so they’ve done little to explore its potential. … Paris imports talent and exports books, but neither trade names nor rights.”

At poetry slam-like events with names such as Pundemonium and Punderdome, contestants lob word-play back and forth before (and often at) a cheering/groaning audience.

“When we talk about the novelist as critic, or the critic as novelist, the as matters. It creates a hierarchy by tucking one identity inside the other, like a pair of Russian nesting dolls. Which body is the central one, the beating heart?”

In Brooklyn a small group celebrates and works to keep alive the ancient and official language of the Inca Empire.”