ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

WORDS

A Writer, Choosing Not To Look Away

Orlaine McDonald, author of No Small Thing: "I’m a painfully slow writer and can find it really hard to commit anything to the page without wanting to immediately revise and refine.”- The Guardian (UK)

Florida Man Thinks Jane Austen Was An American

Most unfortunately for young Floridians, this particular Florida man is also the state’s Commissioner of Education. “In Diaz’s defense, ‘freedom’ does appear four times , and there are a number of discussions of shooting guns.” - LitHub

What Stories The Literary World Tells About Itself

Among publishers, editors, scholars, critics, and even writers themselves, the stories we tell about literature are more and more stories of the economy of prestige, of one generation’s preferences righteously overturning those of its predecessors. - Granta

On “The Gulag Archipelago” At 50

"Why doesn’t Solzhenitsyn’s catalogue of horrors grow boring? You read three volumes about boots trampling on human faces and your attention never flags. One reason is that Solzhenitsyn is a master of ironic narration. … But the nature of Solzhenitsyn’s 'experiment in literary investigation' explains why this book remains riveting." - The New Criterion

Boris Kachka, Books Editor Laid Off By L.A. Times, Moves To The Atlantic

Kachka was one of the 115 staffers (roughly 20% of the newsroom) at the Los Angeles Times who were made redundant in January. Before going to California in 2020, he was the books editor at New York magazine, where he was a contributing editor for 14 years. - Publishers Weekly

How The Sports Novel Reached Adulthood

"For much of its history, the Western sports novel had been the stuff of inspirational boys’ tales, full of moral instruction and can’t-lose heroes. … But the twenty-first century, and specifically the past decade, have served as an even richer terrain for the literature of athletics." - Esquire

Academic Publishing Is A Rip Off. We Need Reform

The annual revenues of the “big five” commercial publishers – Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature, and SAGE – are each in the billions, and some have staggering profit margins approaching 40%, surpassing even the likes of Google. - The Guardian

Librarians Cull Books All The Time. How Do They Decide What Goes?

With public libraries mandated to support literacy, recreational reading, and free access to information, today’s librarians make decisions about removing books amid competing pressures on their spaces and budgets. - The Conversation

German Media Giant Axel Springer, Owner Of Politico And Business Insider, Considers Breaking Itself Up

"A potential deal would separate its media assets from its digital classifieds operation, handing the former to CEO Mathias Doepfner and the founder's widow Friede Springer, and the latter to KKR and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board." - Reuters

How To Write Funny

Author Sally Franson says that if you want belly laughs, you might have to go through some painful experiences first. “The harder I laughed or the harder I cried, the more people laughed. And it wasn’t malicious, you know, it was like, I see you. That is so human.” - Slate

An American Novelist, Telling Immigrant Stories Anew

Dinaw Mengestu, on his character Samuel: “There’s a limitation to how fully we can truly understand his experiences. ... That gap becomes part of the narrative, part of what the story is trying to deeply engage with.” - The New York Times

The Vein Writers Have To Tap Into

C. Pam Zhang: “It’s fascinating to see that there’s no linear relationship between input and output when it comes to creativity. For me, it feels like there’s a vein you tap into sometimes if you’re lucky.” - The Guardian (UK)

This Alice Munro Short Story May Explain Her Reaction To Her Husband’s Molestation Of Her Daughter

In 1993 — not long after Munro's daughter Andrea told her mother of the abuse and Munro chose to stay with her husband — the author published in The New Yorker a story titled "Vandals." Laura Miller analyzes the tale and finds a likely explanation (though not a justification) of Munro's choice. - Slate (MSN)

Five Interesting, And Perhaps Flawed, Metaphors For Translation

Two of them involve Legos. One is about a quilt, another about Dr. Frankenstein and his monster, and yet another is about industrialized agriculture, with English as a monocrop. - The Paris Review

How One Author Found The Right Audio Narrator For His Book

Michael Andor Brodeur, whose day job is classical music critic for The Washington Post, was relieved when informed he would not be recording the audiobook of his memoir/cultural history Swole: The Making of Men and the Meaning of Muscle. Then he had to choose who would. - The Washington Post (MSN)

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