Category: words

“The role of editor emerged in an era of constraint: there are only so many words and pictures you can fit into fifty pages of newsprint. We now live in the age of abundance, in which anything and everything can be published. There is, in theory, less need for an editor to say what works and what doesn’t.”

Louis Menand: “People who imagine Updike as serenely aloof from the world of his contemporaries, afloat in a bubble of New Yorker fame and public adulation, are missing the point of much of what he wrote. You might think that the Cheevers and the Pynchons had the better side of the argument about postwar American life, but you can do that only if you start by taking Updike seriously.”

“Now, in one of the stranger comebacks in literary history, LJ Smith is independently resurrecting her stories about the adolescent undead. She’s publishing her own version of “The Vampire Diaries” digitally on Amazon, as fan fiction, creating a parallel fictional universe that many hard-core fans regard as more legitimate than the official canon.”

“If it takes four years for every 3,000 manuscripts, the the entire library may not be online for over 109 years. The documents are expected to consume 43 quadrillion bytes of storage space, and will be backed up in case files are corrupted or accidentally deleted.”

“All through childhood I wrote verses and mysteries. There is, for me, one connection: structure. My poetry is metrical, rhyming. My crime novels are highly structured. I never start out with a dead body. I start with an impossible scenario. Opening questions should be mysterious, weird, intriguing and contain the seeds of the solution.”

“In one of the stranger comebacks in literary history, Ms. Smith is independently resurrecting her stories about the adolescent undead. She’s publishing her own version of ‘The Vampire Diaries’ digitally on Amazon, as fan fiction, creating a parallel fictional universe that many hard-core fans regard as more legitimate than the official canon.”

“My favorite day at that store was when the power went out for a few hours but we didn’t close. We experienced booksellers manned the computer-less information desk, answering questions using only our amassed knowledge of books in print. It was like bookseller thunderdome, and I have to say that I killed it.”

“The new collection, called Garlic in Fiction, is edited by two of Ms. Jackson’s children … and includes her fiction (like the short story ‘Paranoia,’ which was published for the first time in The New Yorker last summer), as well as drawings, lectures and works of nonfiction that previously appeared in women’s magazines of the 1940s and ’50s.”

“It is with deep sadness that I announce that the volume of requests has exceeded my abilities, and I will be throwing my ‘blurbing pen’ into the Hudson River during a future ceremony, time and place to be determined.” (He is making exceptions, though, including all owners of long-haired dachshunds.)

Called “our very own Charles Dickens” by Librarian of Congress James H. Billington, “the 83-year-old editor, professor and novelist has won almost every literary honor an American writer can receive.”