For much of the past century in Ukraine, Russian has taken precedence over Ukrainian, even in the post-Soviet period. These days one hears more and more Ukrainian in the streets, especially among young adults. even in Kyiv and the Russophone stronghold of Kharkiv. - MSN (The Washington Post)
The originals were mostly published as serials in Yiddish newspapers and never made it into bound volumes in any language until now. Says one scholar, "This literature has been hiding in plain sight, but we all assumed it wasn't there." - The New York Times
Linguists have dubbed it Multicultural London English (MLE); it has developed organically among young people in a city where hundreds of languages are spoken, borrowing vocabulary and syntax from several of them, most noticeably Jamaican English. Rebecca Mead writes about watching her teenage son acquire it. - The New Yorker
The teen members of Kutztown’s Banned Book Club, meet every two weeks to read and discuss literature that conservatives across the country are working to ban from school libraries. - The Guardian
In To the Lighthouse, "these dishes are described with great fanfare but, as any competent home cook will know, beef stews are neither challenging to make nor impressive to look at. ... They do not require, as Woolf’s depiction would have it, a series of complicated steps." - The Paris Review
For decades, the early 20th century fiction written by Yiddish women was "dismissed by publishers as insignificant or unmarketable to a wider audience." Luckily, "there has been a surge of translations of female writers by Yiddish scholars devoted to keeping the literature alive." - The New York Times
"New narrative booms. Its dissociative forms and themes — the anxiety/bliss of romance/sex, psychic roleplay, identity-in-ideology, dream states, trauma, more sex — now serve a community of passion addicts, haunted memoirists, and mental thrill-riders hungering for a higher high." - Los Angeles Review of Books
Yes, partly because the film absolutely bombed at the box office. "Wonder Boys succeeds. It succeeds because it failed, and because at heart it’s about failure. And writers are connoisseurs of failure." - LitHub
The erasure of collaborators - and the sometimes terrible behavior to others - is just the tip of the iceberg. See: A new novel about Erik Satie for something a bit more balanced. - The Atlantic
"The elimination of Maus from a Tennessee county language arts curriculum does not live up to its more hysterical billing. It is not a ban, and it does not seem to be motivated by outright bigotry." However: There's something far more sinister on the horizon. - Slate
"In Wordle, your own language skills, memory, and the Wordle dictionary mean that no human (with the possible exception of an eccentric memory champ) could correctly identify 12,972 eligible words in as many guesses." - Slate
Even as international travel restrictions are being lifted, some writers say they will continue to carry on with virtual events because they are more convenient and accessible. They say this has the additional benefit of leaving them with more time to focus on their craft. - BBC
Four scholars offer their answers in a roundtable — including the observation that, in the rare instances when that does happen, the book itself isn't always very good. (Also, no cheating by calling the King James Bible literature.) - History Today
"That Ulysses was an event nearly everyone will agree. However, can we say even now, a century later, what kind of event it really was in Irish or world literary terms? And is Ulysses really a novel at all in any case?" - Dublin Review of Books
