ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

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The Little Engine Trying To Chug Its Way Up The Hill: Literary Review Of Canada Turns 30

Thirty years on, the LRC still feels like a very Canadian experiment, addressing the country’s challenges even as it faces them itself. - Toronto Star

Spotify Moves Into Audiobooks The Silicon Valley Way — By Buying A Company

The acquisition of audiobook platform Findaway lets Spotify "quickly bring a large catalog of audiobooks to its massive user base … in the way the company jump-started its push into podcasts with the acquisitions of Gimlet, Anchor, Parcast and The Ringer." - Variety

Five Books That Will Change The Way You Think About Climate Change

In contrast to the simplistic idea that all we need to do is implement a set of technological and lifestyle changes, they offer a new way of understanding and relating to nature. - The Conversation

The Trope Of “Hot” Women In Literature

A cursory review of Western literature and fiction suggests that the instinct to render fictional heroines “hot” has both a long history and one which continues to this day. - LitHub

Novelists Could Take A Cue Or Two From Poets

Or so says a novelist who took a poetry class that helped her move forward after a stale period of writer's block. - LitHub

So Sorry That We Missed National Cliche Day

Oh: "Cliché comes from the printing process when a metal plate was used to physically transfer ink to paper. The term echoes the imitative sound of the plate coming off the page and was a way to represent an image again and again in nearly identical form." - Salon

A Changing Climate Changes The Oxford English Dictionary

For instance, global heating "conveys 'more emphatically the seriousness of climate change caused by human activity and the urgent need to address it.' After all, global warming connotes a kind of coziness when there is nothing cozy about a heating planet." - CBC

Dostoevsky Totally Did NaNoWriMo

Just not on a computer, in November, with thousands of other people. - LitHub

How Shakespeare Drove Publishing And Publishing Drove Shakespeare In The 1700s

In the mid-1730s, Robert Walker waged a price war with the London publishing establishment, driving the cost of individual play editions down to just one penny each. This led to a significant expansion of Shakespeare’s readership. - The Conversation

Co-opting Woke

Charles Blow: "Perhaps no other word of the moment is so under attack as “woke,” a word born as a simple yet powerful way of saying, be aware of and alert to how racism is systemic and pervasive and suffuses American life." - The New York Times

Writers Ought To Be Trained The Way Actors Are

"Actors in training get to try out different techniques and approaches, learning to develop a character through movement, script analysis, or emotional connection; they take classes honing their bodies and voices. In my MFA writing program, we got … workshop and some books." - Catapult

Ocean Vuong Bombarded By Complaints From Australian 12th Graders Who Got His Writing On Their Comp Exams

Student: "ur text was good but so confusing". Vuong: "mission accomplished". Student: "So u da one that got us all fucked up". Vuong: "Don't let 'em tell you literature can't change lives". - The Guardian

Oxford’s Bodleian Library Was A Wreck Before The Eponymous Bodley Fixed It Up

"In 1598, … Sir Thomas Bodley, a retired diplomat and Oxford alumnus, offered to restore the dilapidated university library, entirely at his own cost. … (It) had stood vacant for several decades, its books removed during the upheavals of the Reformation, its furniture sold off." - Literary Hub

How Julia Child Changed Americans’ Minds, And, Later, Her Own

Those under 55 may not appreciate just how differently people in the US thought about home cooking before Child's TV shows caught on. For all her pioneering achievements, she was awfully traditional about things like sexuality — until the late 1980s. - The Guardian

Portland’s Iconic Super Bookstore Faces Uncertainty

The latest plot twist has foreshadowed a potentially unhappy ending. Like the rest of Portland’s urban core — and like downtowns across the United States —Powell’s is contending with staggering uncertainty. - The New York Times

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