Category: words

“Darm mit Charme (‘Charming Bowels’) – which has sat atop the German paperback charts for the last eight weeks and shifted more than 200,000 copies in the process – may deal with defecation, constipation and other bowel movements, but its message is far from flippant: our gastrointestinal tract is not only the body’s most under-appreciated organ, but ‘the brain’s most important adviser’.”

“All over the country research libraries are canceling subscriptions to academic journals, because they are caught between decreasing budgets and increasing costs. The logic of the bottom line is inescapable, but there is a higher logic that deserves consideration—namely, that the public should have access to knowledge produced with public funds.”

In a new project titled “Next Line, Please”, David Lehman is asking readers to collaborate on a Shakespearean sonnet on the anomie of modern office life with the opening line, “How like a prison is my cubicle”.

But yes, a complainant actually argued that the book “encourages children to use violence against their fathers”, demanded that it be removed from the library shelves, and even asked that the city pay damages.

“At a bookstore, you can browse the shelves, open a book, sample its pages as well as those of its peers shelved in the same category or by the same author. With Amazon, if you do not know the author or the title or a great deal of the plot; your chances of finding that book you overheard friends talking about is like a pricking yourself while rolling in a haystack.”

“If you’re a person whose perception of the world is shaped by literature, Dublin can feel less like a place that James Joyce wrote about than a place that is about James Joyce’s writing. The city of his fiction exists in ghostly superimposition over the actual city … Joyce will not be escaped. He inheres in the city’s bones.”

Author/editor/publisher Victoria Brownworth was there when the Philadelphia institution was literally a room down at South and Third, and she was with it through all of its moves, she marked major parts in her own life in the handsome old brick house where the store helped anchor the city’s community, and she watched the last-ditch efforts to save it fall apart.

There’s no ironclad proof like traces of Will’s DNA, but the handwritten annotations in the book offer some interesting circumstantial evidence of not only who owned the dictionary but what play he was working on when he used it. (audio)

“I’ve poked around online to find “best of” lists or other recommendations, but it soon became clear that there wasn’t even a provisional consensus on which books were the best or essential romance novels.”

“The Internet, however, has been relentless in its gradual destruction of the store and cultural landmark. So, come mid-May, Giovanni’s Room – one of the nation’s few such bookstores – will close, ending its run as an oasis for gays in search of literature, and even shelter during more hostile years gone by.”