Category: words

With Ragnarok predicted for February 22 (yes, of this year), author Joanne Harris wonders: “For centuries, artists, writers and composers from Wagner, Tolkien, and Tennyson to Marvel Comics have taken inspiration from these tales of conflict, companionship and adventure. Why?”

“One of the consolations of traditional authorship is that when a book is published, it’s finished. There’s that moment when the first hardbound copies come back from the publisher and one thinks: ‘Well, that’s that: now on to the next thing.'”

When Claire Tomalin began her research into Dickens’s mistress, she found that Nelly Ternan had “vanished into thin air”. Nora, Véra, Zelda and Nelly are writers’ Wags, which in this case stands for “wives and ghosts” – and the best ghost stories have long been found in literary biographies.

“There are people with bullhorns and there are ecosystems of people with bullhorns. There are institutions and networks, formal and otherwise, in which we all live and dream, tell stories and finger our worry beads. The ecosystems in which books are developed, written, published, publicized, and enjoyed are no different.”

“Changes in the protagonist’s emotional or physical state [trigger] discrete feedback in the wearable, whether by changing the heartbeat rate, creating constriction through air pressure bags, or causing localized temperature fluctuations,” the designers explain.

“Public libraries circulated 2.46 billion materials last year, the greatest volume in 10 years. Over this same period, the circulation of children’s book and materials increased by more than 28 percent. Attendance at library-hosted programs for kids hit 60.5 million in 2013.”

The letter, organized by PEN International and signed by four Nobel laureates (Grass, Soyinka, Jelinek and Pamuk) as well as Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, and many others, says that recent laws against “gay propaganda”, blasphemy and defamation “specifically put writers at risk.”

“The upgraded website includes 10,000 new multispectral images, extra manuscript descriptions, content translated into Russian and German in addition to the current languages, a faster search engine, and easy access from the site to the Facebook page and to Twitter.”

Yes, this is real – and Snicket (children’s author Daniel Handler) is funding it himself. Why? “Because librarians have suffered enough.”

“I did what I did and it’s done. There’s more to life than writing and publishing fiction. There is another way entirely, amazed as I am to discover it at this late date.”