Category: words

It’s for ”We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.” The $15,000 prize honors the best work of fiction published in the preceding year by an American.

“Despite our recession-era reckoning with economics and inequality, fiction that examines both the macro and micro experience of poverty is all too rare. Of the writers who do venture forth in the tradition of John Steinbeck, many are finding new and riveting approaches to an age-old subject. But there are crucial gaps, still. And as brilliantly as Steinbeck wrote about poverty, we cannot rely on him to comprehensively tell today’s story.”

“Nowadays you just use Wikipedia every day without even thinking how large that might be … the English Wikipedia has 4.5 million articles. Nobody can imagine this number. It’s only when you see this in print or in a physical form that you realize how large it really is.”

“Super-geeks (from geek, meaning fool) to a man, slang’s lexicographers tend to be self-appointed guardians who, while cheerfully plagiarising each other in their project to demonstrate the importance and scope of slang, have yet to agree on a definition of what, precisely, slang is, or was – or even its origin.”

HarperCollins editor Barry Harbaugh: “The editorial staffs of New York houses are not the faceless lemmings that a certain retail giant with a vested stake in self-publishing would have us be. And though it would appear to outsiders that the health of our careers depends solely on measurements of quantity (of the books that we acquire and the units sold), we’re not numbers-obsessed automatons. Editors edit. A lot.”

“The literary writer who attains commercial success is a rare breed. One who mixes genres, merges history with fable, and mines the constrictive reality of his repressive state – while boasting of sales in the millions – may only exist in one person. And, surprisingly enough, that person is Chinese.”

“Until a digital book is a magical object which physically transforms from 50 Shades into the new James Smythe novel according to your whim; until you can walk through a digital library and open books at random; until the technology becomes as satisfying to the physical senses as the text is to the cognitive self, there’s still a need for shiny, gorgeous, satisfying books.”

“Do you realize that asking writers to pick favorite writers causes us physical pain — like asking a 5-year-old to name her bestest best friend while the rest of the class is listening?”

“An experiment like this, I thought, could also be a useful corrective to the easy acceptance that value for money has just one currency. Consumers have come to expect discounts. In fact, most feel positively cheated if a price tag hasn’t been visibly slashed. By offering goods without any money at all exchanging hands, The Book Barge could become an attractive proposition to buyers.”

“There’s no set way to approach a manuscript. Nobody tells you, ‘This is how to edit. Follow these steps.’ Everyone comes to a manuscript with a different perspective, and you quickly learn that each editor has his or her own personal preferences — conventions they love (and maybe even overuse) and things that are huge pet peeves.”