Here's how to be good at it: Plan ahead. "What’s really important when you’re listening is to be able to know who’s talking. One of the hardest things is when you have a group of, like, five men and they’re all 40, and they’re all having a beer together. How you make those voices sound different?" - Slate
Viet Thanh Nguyen says it wasn't as easy as writing The Sympathizer, his 2016 Pulitzer-winning novel: "I would write in 50-page chunks – I wrote 50 pages before the Pulitzer. Then my life got really messy for a couple of years while I wrote the middle of the book. Towards the end, I finally figured out how to balance...
Ask Melville House. Or perhaps don't: "We did what you would tell your children to never do. Not just having a business, but funding it the way we did: with our own money, with credit cards, we emptied out our bank accounts. I had a very small retirement fund from my life as a college professor and I emptied...
Three great tastes that taste great together. But seriously: Literature is replete with math (and music), and here's a professor who can talk about how Melville played with math in Moby Dick - and also disprove "an 18th-century Italian musical board game that promised 'un infinito numero di minuette trio.' The object of the game: Players compose a 16-bar...
This truly seems to delight English speakers. "For example, Coronamutationsgebiet is an area where coronavirus mutations are widespread. A Geisterveranstaltung (ghost event) is an event with no people in attendance, usually sports. Live music is allowed, provided the audience remains in their cars, at an Autokonzert." - NPR
Conservatives heard that Loudon County had banished Dr. Seuss and started a backlash about "cancel culture." But that wasn't reality. "In fact, the Virginia county hadn’t banned his books but merely released guidance — back in 2019 — suggesting a pivot toward more diverse reading. Read Across America has been issuing the same guidance since 2018. And over the past several...
"I assumed most people knew that Seuss, despite the support he expressed for civil rights, was capable of depicting human beings of other races in demeaning ways. Painting Seuss as a victim of rabid 'wokeness' is like saying police brutality is a recent epidemic that began when people started uploading cellphone footage. No, it’s in the news because some white people...
Philip Nel, a Seuss scholar (yes, there is such a thing): "Yes, there are some examples of him revising in response to criticism, and you can give him credit for that — but I would only give partial credit! … I think what is surprising to people is that this was a guy who throughout his work tried to...
In the wake of the decision by Dr. Seuss Enterprises to stop printing and selling If I Ran the Zoo, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, and four other titles — and of conservative media's ginned-up outrage — American customers are snapping up all of the author's children's books. On Amazon's bestseller list as of...
The structural troubles those papers were facing before 2020 were bad enough; then COVID shut down their main sources of ad revenue (performance venues, bars and clubs, restaurants). " there are many that, against all odds, have survived. In true alt-weekly edge, it's a stubborn, punk refusal to let go. Here are four of their stories." - The Daily...
"The Man of To-morrow's Lament" — written as the superhero's internal monologue as he walks through the city with Lois Lane, ruing that they can never have children together — was submitted to, and rejected by, The New Yorker in the summer of 1942 and then disappeared. - Times Literary Supplement (UK)
To wander through 125 years of book reviews is to endure assault by adjective. All the fatuous books, the frequently brilliant, the disappointing, the essential. The adjectives one only ever encounters in a review (indelible, risible), the archaic descriptors (sumptuous). So many masterpieces, so many duds — now enjoying quiet anonymity. - The New York Times
Lady Chatterley's Lover, which now seems almost anodyne, was the subject of a criminal prosecution in 1960, but Lolita, which came out the previous year and still has the power to shock, was not. Why? Actor Emily Mortimer, whose father was a barrister who defended more than one client in obscenity trials, uses what she learned from him ("First,...
"Six Dr. Seuss books — including And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street and If I Ran the Zoo — will stop being published because of racist and insensitive imagery, the business that preserves and protects the author's legacy said Tuesday." - AP
Bookshop.org was launched in the US a year ago and in the UK in November. Pitching itself as a socially conscious way to buy books online, it allows booksellers to create a virtual shop front. For books ordered directly from these online stores, booksellers receive 30% of the cover price from each sale without having to handle customer service...
