After starting as kids’ entertainment, they were used as World War II propaganda and even a vehicle for public education about the atomic bomb. Then some comics, pursuing an adult audience, grew dark, violent and sexual enough to cause an outright moral panic. And then came the '60s. - The Nation
Reviewers are faced with essays that are additions to their already heavy workloads that could have used more time. And the inclination to take one’s frustrations out on the author is just too great. - 3 Quarks Daily
"You can't handle the truth!" or "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." "Celebrity sentences," Nicola Sayers dubs them. "There are countless brilliant sentences that never make it to celebrity status. So what's the formula? What elevates certain sentences above the others?" - 3 Quarks Daily
Selling books is complex, and author Malinda Lo, winner of the National Book Award for young people, says the label is just marketing. "I like very complicated people who make bad decisions because, you know what? Those are the ones who make the best characters." - Slate
Or perhaps ever. Rebecca Watson: "I really don’t believe there’s a correlation ... but people try to map the piece onto the novel and interpret it as confessional. This novel was never an act of catharsis. It was a joyful act of creation." - The Guardian (UK)
Ana Iris Simón has been "stunned not only by the success of her book, but also by how an ultranationalist and conservative audience ... embraced Feria as an ode to Spain’s traditional family values" - which, she says, it is not. - The New York Times
The writer of House of the Spirits says, "Didn’t I tell you that we live under a patriarchy? ... But women have been tearing bits and pieces out of the situation little by little. And they will succeed, but I will not be alive to see it." - El País (English)
Or, at least, that worked for Costa prize winner Caleb Azumah Nelson, who had been working at an Apple Store before an agent bit on his writing. - The Guardian (UK)
Bernadine Evaristo: "I’m always amused when my young students create frail, old characters hunched over walking sticks, only for them to tell me that they’re in their forties. I would have been the same." - LitHub
Writers and artists are not primarily trying to reform the world; their mission is to imagine it, to deliver it. Yes, there can be a profound ethical payload in such work, but it is rarely prescriptive or amenable to legislation. - LitHub
The old classics still have the power to move and transform young people in ways that no technical education can. We don’t have to dilute the practical value of a higher education nor ignore the insights of the academic humanities to restore the vitality of liberal education in our colleges and universities. - Aeon
If the confusion of tongues is not the primary source of human conflict, might the corollary be true: that resolving conflict doesn’t require a common language? - Psyche
People tend to give books that win classic or canonic status, presuming that a Newbery medalist from decades ago will always be good for today's kids. That isn't true, of course. So what should, and shouldn't, do we do about the winners that seem benighted these days? - Slate
