ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

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New York Times Experiments With Insta/Twitter To Focus Stories

"You have the copy of the tweet, a couple of lines in the card, and then it’s just a lot more information and context, and everyone knows that context can be lacking on social.” - NiemanLab

This Flight Attendant Wrote A Hair-Raising Novel By Jotting It On Cocktail Napkins

Author T.J. Newman: "I said , 'What would you do if your family was kidnapped and you were told that if you didn't crash the plane, they'd be killed?' I knew by the look on his face that I'd struck a nerve. He was terrified. He didn't have an answer. And I knew I had a story." - The...

Why Writers Need Agents

Writers need agents more than agents need writers. They have needed them since the late 19th century, when an increasingly literate public fed by the magazines and single-volume prints made possible by the invention of Linotype printing created a lucrative industry. - The Guardian

A Battle Between Under-40s And Over-40s At Publishing Houses

“The distinction really is between social media natives who don’t really treasure free speech because they’ve had a lifetime’s worth and think it’s overrated, and people of an older generation who didn’t have access to the means of cultural production and needed the patronage of newspapers and publishing houses to get their voices heard.” - The Observer

Donald Barthelme, Maybe The Least Likely New Yorker Writer Ever

"By most standards, many of his stories aren't stories at all. They don't have plots, or even realistic, believable characters. … In the manner of visual artists like Duchamp and Rauschenberg, they incorporated all sorts of found materials: snippets from ad copy, old travel guides, textbooks, and instruction manuals, even other writers." - Literary Hub

Book Sales Soar Year-Over-Year (Duh!)

It comes as little surprise that statistics newly released by the Association of American Publishers found that total sales for the 1,358 publishers that report results to the association jumped 43.7% in April 2021 over the same period last year. - Publishers Weekly

A New American Heroine: Sapphire’s ‘Push’ At 25

Tayari Jones: "The miracle of Sapphire's gift is that she weaves her sharp social commentary and critique into the fabric of this story without shredding its fibres. This is a novel about people and their problems, not problems and their people.." - The Guardian

Louis Menand Takes On O. Henry

In New York, he began producing at an astonishing rate. He contracted to write a story a week for the Sunday World, and he continued to write for magazines. In 1904 alone, he published sixty-six stories. - The New Yorker

A Social History Of The Asterisk

By the eighteenth century the asterisk was being deployed as a sort of censorship, covering up letters to represent a d**n vulgar word without actually b**y spelling it out. But, as W. Somerset Maugham points out, this has become somewhat outmoded. - Lapham's Quarterly

The Path To Being An Audiobook Narrator

Training in theatre helps a lot, and so does stamina. - LitHub

Writer Brandon Taylor On His Summer Reading Goals

This year, it's all Freud. Why? The author of Real Life and Filthy Animals: "At the start of the year I read a lot of American mid-century critics, people like Lionel Trilling and Alfred Kazin. They kept talking about Freud. I realized I should read Freud because he’s had such an impact on contemporary literature. It had immediate dividends....

The Orwell Prizes Go To Up-To-The-Moment Political Books

Ali Smith won for her Summer, the concluding novel in her seasonal quartet - and one that encompasses Brexit, Australian wildfires, COVID-19, and the murder of George Floyd. She cited Orwell’s combination of political writing and art as an inspiration. "The place where these two things meet can’t not be a place of humane – and inhumane – revelation."...

The Writers Trying To Save The World Through Fiction

The novelists hope: "As long as we continue to think and to tell stories, we are not necessarily doomed." Perhaps. - The Guardian (UK)

The Author Who Wanted To Write A New King Lear

Anne Enright on The Green Road on having a plan for her plot, her idea to write a new King Lear: "The children had other needs. I followed them, let them grow up and, really, given the circumstances – the mother’s vanity, the father’s silence – there was a limit to how far and whether they could get away."...

Why Do People Feel Compelled To Correct Others’ Mispronunciations?

Why do people pronounce words differently, why does pronunciation change, and why does so-called mispronunciation upset some people to the point of making it possible (and interesting) to compile a top ten list? - The Conversation

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