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....
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."...
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 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
"It's hard to make sense of what the NFT creative landscape might mean for otherwise underpaid writers. At once, it's a place for writers to experiment with form, publish and earn money directly and instantly without any traditional publishing gatekeepers. It's also a brand-new subculture with no reliable routes to financial success or readership, cut off from a larger...
"This is the unfortunate fate of most books, even literary prize-winners. … something that Untapped: The Australian Literary Heritage Project is trying to rectify. … Untapped's mission is to digitise 200 of Australia's most important books, preserving them for future generations and making them available through a national network of libraries." - The Guardian
Thomas Swick: "The epigraph page is like a ceremonial gate ushering us into the realm of the author with his or her beloved quotation from a great mind or celebrated scamp that perfectly reflects, or distills, the essence of what follows. … I am always disappointed when I don't find one. It's like looking at a man in a...
These “secular bibles” (the Bible is not one of them) are “books for daily life that ostensibly taught readers one subject, all while subtly instructing them about their role in society and their responsibilities to family and to country.” - The New York Times
The hyperbole on book jackets—both the plot summaries and the lists of adulatory adjectives that go with them—have long frustrated authors, but no one would dispute that a good blurb has crucial functions. - Prospect
"I want to say, of course literature is just as important , but this is something in the dead of night I kind of worry about. … I've been saying for years, if you take away reading, take away literature, you take away something very, very important in the way we human beings communicate with each other. … We've...
Beginning in 1744, he published about 100 storybooks for children, plus magazines and “ABC” books, becoming the leading children’s publisher of his time. - Washington Post
"The word 'blurb' was coined in 1907 by the comic writer Gelett Burgess but they have been around a long time. ... One of the first major carnivals of blurbery came in 1516, when, ahead of the publication of his satire Utopia, Thomas More wrote to his friend Erasmus, urging him to make sure the book 'be handsomely set...
Most novels feature characters with an assortment of different backgrounds, and this can require narrators to voice characters with identities very different from their own. - Slate
