"Among the titles being cast into the maw of the volcano this year: Blake Bailey's oozing hagiography of Philip Roth, Mitch Albom's latest cavity-inducing parable, Andrew Sullivan's overfull toilet of essays" (fed to the merciless Dale Peck) "and Malcolm Gladwell's smug apologia for American butchery." - Book Marks
"Cervantes knew that after the terrible, dogmatic reality in which he lived, there would be imagination. But" — having spent years in Algiers — "the power, beauty, humor, and eloquence of Islamic Spain wasn't something he had to imagine." - Public Books
What makes for a good word, in the eyes of a crossword-puzzle constructor? The language of aesthetic judgment is gustatory—one has good taste or feels something in one’s gut—but crosswords are meant to transcend physical sensations. - The New Yorker
There is a contradiction here of both scorning a system that’s shallow and rigged, and also feeling bitter about not being able to succeed within such a system in order to get our remuneration. - The Point
Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (1898) has inspired many a movie and television adaptation as well as a major opera. Adam Scovell looks at the novella's enduring appeal for adapters. - Literary Hub
John McWhorter: "To simply know that the kinds of questions Rousseau stimulates are, indeed, questions makes you a better person in the sheer sense of understanding the complexity of the real world, something that escapes ideologues of all kinds." - The New York Times
"Well, friends, another grim and grueling plague year is drawing to a close, and that can mean only one thing." Reading - but why not the best reviewed books in translation of 2021? Why not, for instance, Jhumpa Lahiri translating herself? - LitHub
"Whether owing to regional or racial bias, or to the author’s deeply ingrained humility and privacy, Kenan has not taken his rightful place in the postmodern canon, though his fictional town of Tims Creek proved as generative as any Macondo or Yoknapatawpha." - The New York Times
"Patrons savor the chance to browse aisles of paperbacks and hardcovers stacked on tables in pavilions from different countries. ... To revel in what to many Iraqis is the true, enduring character of Baghdad." - The New York Times
Owner Lucy Yu made the decision "to embark on this journey—now, in the midst of a pandemic, on the heels of so much anti-Asian hatred" because what else has kept people going during the pandemic but stories - and community? - LitHub
Mind, it's not a sequel. Dickens published a series of five Christmas novellas; A Christmas Carol was the first. London's Dickens Museum hopes to get some attention for the third, The Cricket on the Hearth, with an exhibition of the original illustrations. - The Guardian
The site has no paywall; the model is like that of public radio in the US: convince visitors to contribute. Now more than 1 million people worldwide make recurring donations, nearly double the number three years ago. (The Guardian also has 100,000 print subscribers.) - Axios
Literature professors have often had significant difficulty acknowledging their expertise and corresponding difficulty in justifying their status to skeptics, for broadly two reasons. - Public Books
