Category: words

“What drew writers to Iowa was not the innate splendor of a spontaneously good idea. What drew writers to Iowa is what draws writers anywhere: money and hype, which tend to be less spontaneous than ideas. So where did the money and the hype come from?”

Americans “don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature.” When the internationally celebrated author Herta Müller won the Nobel in 2009, Europeans poked fun at the bafflement of Americans with headlines like: “Amerikaanse Mewedia: ‘Müller, Who the f*** Is Müller?’”

“Born from frustrations with the Man Booker, the Folio chose eight writers from the US, Canada and Britain, all of whom ‘take risks’.”

“While the television industry has begun catering to impatient audiences by releasing entire series at once, the book business is upending its traditional timetable by encouraging a kind of binge reading, releasing new works by a single author at an accelerated pace.”

“The fact that people increasingly use the Internet with a smartphone, and only a smartphone, has disrupted television, books and news, among other things, and media companies have scrambled to adjust. Wikipedia, the world’s fifth-largest website, but one with a relatively minuscule operating budget, has been especially slow to adapt to a mobile world.”

“With the exceptions of warmongering doublespeak and racial epithets, is there any more pernicious linguistic remnant of the 20th century than the phrase ‘guilty pleasure’? And how did these two concepts ever come to be married anyway?”

“Sony, which is essentially a non-player in the U.S. ebook market at this point, is cutting its losses and shutting down its digital bookstore in the U.S. and Canada, the company reported Thursday”

“I’m sure Apple or Kobo or Google would be just delighted to have their ebooks integrated into Barnes & Noble’s suite of offerings, and probably Amazon would too, although they would almost certainly never be asked.”

“One thing that you have understand if you’re gonna get into writing romance is that the things that are valued in that genre are not the same things that are valued when we read something like literary fiction.”

“If Rowling feels that strongly, she should write a sequel putting right what she thinks she got wrong – Harry Potter and the Acrimonious Divorce, perhaps.”