This is not great. "The past year ... has laid bare just how perilous a job you like, or even love, can be when you’re working without the most basic of safety nets. This fragility is something that Strand employees have always known — they work in retail, after all. Before, though, the job had just enough perks, just...
"In one camp, translators argue that the issue is representation in the field, not whether a white translator is incapable of translating an author of a different background. Another contingent believes the incident signals a threatening policing of who is eligible to translate, a step closer to a world where the validity of one’s experience and ideas is contingent...
The act and the art of translation requires the permission to transcend borders, the permission to make mistakes, and the permission to be repeated, by anyone who feels the tempestuous tug, and the clarion call, of the unfamiliar. To rein in such liberty through categories and compartments that imprison our creativity is a disservice to the human imagination. -...
Being that the South has been open to the rest of the world while the North has been sealed off for seven decades, the Korean spoken on the two sides of the DMZ is rather different. South Korea's Unification Ministry has been hoping that an "inter-Korean dictionary" — launched in 2005 and currently getting a new push from Seoul...
"When IKEA canceled its beloved print catalog last year, it hinted at plans to venture into new formats to better reach an increasingly internet-dependent customer base." And so it did: "Published on Spotify, Audible, and YouTube, the IKEA Audio Catalog is essentially a quippy version of its 288-page product book." But can you really use it to shop without...
"Some of these informal gatherings have flourished as people who once shied away from writing groups — because of the time commitment, commute or intimidation factor of a room full of aspiring authors — are finding that the pandemic has lowered the barriers to entry." - The New York Times
“I’d call the mood mutinous. If you’re writing royal stories or big political news or coronavirus stuff or you’re famous then you’re going to get huge numbers. Most reporters are at the mercy of editors and it’s not their fault if they’re getting assigned boring things – and now that’s going to affect their pay packet.” - The Guardian
"The Israel Antiquities Authority, which carried out the excavations, believes the new scroll, written in Greek, is actually a missing part of the “Book of the 12 Minor Prophets” scroll, first discovered in 1961. … Dating from the third century BC to the first century AD, the parchment and papyrus manuscripts contain the earliest known texts from the Hebrew...
"The technical department had known that the original had been replaced by a copy since May 2014, when book restorers discovered it by accident during a program to preserve old books from acid-deterioration called IFADU. But despite this discovery, in these four intervening years, the forged copy of Sidereus Nuncius left by the thief continued to appear in the...
The Washington Post talked to the owners of six indies about how they weathered the year. What follows is an oral history of these shops’ highs and lows as the pandemic knocked life and business upside down. - Washington Post
Despite the pandemic, book sales were up over all last year, but mostly for places like Amazon; bookstore sales fell by more than twenty-eight per cent. Even at stores where sales held steady or increased, profits declined as customers migrated online, raising shipping and delivery costs. More than one bookstore closed every week in 2020, and many of the...
The author is pleased by the support from his publisher, but the hate has truly ramped up. Sathnam Sanghera: "In a way, it proves the need for this conversation. No conversation or theme I’ve ever tackled is as dysfunctional as empire. It’s like, the strength of opinion out there is in inverse proportion to the amount of knowledge." -...
"The belief that every novel is a self-accounting is timeworn: Some early readers of Lolita suspected that only someone with the mentality of a child predator could have conjured the depraved Humbert Humbert. Publishers, meanwhile, often appear to want readers to see books as thinly veiled autobiography, and their publicity campaigns typically emphasize authors’ personal connections to their work."...
A good memoir "gets into the feelings that are so buried and complex that they rarely come into focus in a conversation, even among good friends." - LitHub
We all have books that are waiting for just such an occasion. When the author of Homecoming and Transcendent Kingdom was young, her parents made her "write a report on the children’s book I was reading at the time. I think it was The Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister. ... I wrote something to the effect of 'This book is very...
