"In a town under siege from Assad's regime, a small group of revolutionaries found a new mission: to build a library from books rescued from the rubble. For those stranded in the city, books offered an imaginative escape from the horrors of war." - The Guardian
As libraries continue to examine their role in digital life, they recognize that one of their critical and unique weapons is the hands-on, brains-on human capital of the librarians and library staff. They have been helping people research and navigate through their online lives for a long time. With libraries’ well-earned and precious reputation as a trusted place with...
Don't just salivate over Ulysses, The Wasteland, and the soon-to-come centennial of 1922. Where would modernist English literature be without Great Gatsby? Mrs. Dalloway? John Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer? Or Hemingway's In Our Time? - The New York Times
TikTok might not be the place we think of immediately for book reviews - but a lot of bookbuyers - that is, young women - do. "Miriam Parker, a vice president and associate publisher at Ecco, which released The Song of Achilles , said the company saw sales spike on Aug. 9 but couldn’t figure out why. It eventually...
And many Black authors resent the implication. Yaa Gyasi on her time touring the United States after her book Homegoing came out: "I was exhausted, not just by the travel but by something that is more difficult to articulate – the dissonance of the black spotlight, of being revered in one way and reviled in another, a revulsion that...
And other plays too. This isn't a "Shakespeare didn't write his own plays" theory; it's a theory about an Elizabethan playwright named Thomas North - and Thomas North's cousin George. - Boston Globe
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...
