I’ve loved my publishing experience with HarperCollins. Everyone I’ve worked with has been a smart adviser and a fierce advocate for a slightly weird first novel in a challenging marketplace. And yet, since November, part of me has worried about today, knowing how conflicted I’d feel. - Slate
"The flat, square block of brownish sandstone has carved scribbles, which … are up to 2,000 years old. … Older runes have been found on other items, but not on stone." - AP
Every great national prose, in just about any tongue, reaches its high meridian only by way of a prolonged and constant negotiation of just this tension between beauty and sublimity—between the decorative and the august, or between the splendid and the lucid. And this comes only at the end of long epochs of development. - The Lamp
Public library branches in Boulder and Englewood, a Denver suburb, were closed to the public for several days after tests found methamphetamine on surfaces and in air vents in the restrooms, apparently due to patrons smoking crystal. - The New York Times
Using a technique called “stylometry”, it can be established that James Patterson probably wrote most of The President is Missing. Stylometry uses computers to statistically analyse the frequency of words in a text. It can be applied to a variety of research purposes, most notably, authorship attribution. - The Conversation
No, not even Colleen Hoover's popularity can win this one. "The coloring book, which was set to be published by Atria, was, according to the publisher, 'Vividly drawn and charmingly relaxing.'" - LitHub
At Orange County, the wait is more than 55 weeks (or was when the article was written, as "more than 700 people are on hold for its 100 or so copies." (The Los Angeles Public Library waitlist has more than 5,500 people on it.) - Los Angeles Times
The game is rigged. It is rigged like capitalism is rigged. There is no puppet master, no conspiracy, only a field where advantages, to begin with, are distributed unequally. You can beat the long odds, but you have long odds to beat. - LA Review of Books
Sentence structure aside, so much of the challenge posed by James’s prose is that words often had different meanings around the turn of the century than they do now. This quiet evolution of language is a facet that can be damnably hard to notice day to day, yet its importance is hard to overstate. - The New York Times
That's certainly the worry professional audiobook readers have, and there's also the worry that someone's voice will be sampled without their consent. Yet, writes Laura Miller, "after listening to selections from more than 25 A.I.-narrated …, I'm convinced that the technology still has a long way to go." - Slate
"The Mesha Stele ... is a basalt stone slab that has provided historians and linguists with the largest source of the Moabite language to date. Researchers have only now been able to verify with a considerable degree of certainty that the stele contains explicit references to King David." - The Jerusalem Post
Paul Frommer, the linguist who created from scratch the language spoken by the inhabitants of the planet Pandora in the hit films, talks about constructing a usable and credible vocabulary and grammar and about how a community (of Earthlings) has developed around teaching and communicating in Na'vi. - Salon
Overall, 2022 was a good year for independent bookshops in the UK and Ireland, who saw their number climb to a 10-year high. According to the Booksellers Association (BA), there are now 1,072 independent bookshops in the UK and Ireland, up 45 on the tally of 1,027 for 2021. - The Guardian
