"When different narrators take on chapters devoted to different characters’ points of view, the listener’s engagement with the book can be heightened. On the other hand, when narrators join in together, in what are often referred to as ensemble productions, the text is usurped by performance, the book disappearing into thespian clamor." - Washington Post
No, it's not that many mediocre men are threatened by smart women (timeless!) or that mismatched marriages can destroy those in the marriage (also timeless!). It's about plague. - LitHub
Aime Césaire, whose Discourse on Colonialism remains (all too) relevant - and who protested to some effect in 2005after French President Jacques Chirac instructed schools to teach about the "positive role" of colonialism - was also "an imaginative writer who molded the French language to make a personal poetry characterized by hypnotic physicality, ritualized anguish, and metaphorical exorcisms." - Hyperallergic
Maybe Asian American writers should stop dissing Tan. "I understand the resistance to being lumped in with her; I feel it, too. But when I recently re-read The Joy Luck Club, I could not help but to be moved by the stories of mothers and daughters, how they accumulate layers and imbue domestic life with the power it has always...
"One of the things I wasn’t thinking about, but which is very obvious to me now, is the great value of having each festival stage exactly what they would like to present. This has brought in a richness I couldn’t have dreamt of." - LitHub
The novel has been misinterpreted for a long time: just after it was published, Fitzgerald complained to Edmund Wilson that "of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one had the slightest idea what the book was about." And that's continued in the popular mind for nearly a century. (The idea of a Gatsby-themed party, after all, seems...
"That semicolons, unlike most other punctuation marks, are fully optional and relatively unusual lends them power; when you use one, you are doing something purposefully, by choice, at a time when motivations are vague and intentions often denied. And there are very few opportunities in life to have it both ways; semicolons are the rare instance in which you...
Alisher Navoiy was born in 1441 in Herat, now in Afghanistan but historically a Persianate city. He wrote in Arabic, Persian, and Chagatai, the Turkic literary language used all over Central Asia in the Middle Ages and considered the ancestor of modern literary Uzbek. In one of his most famous treatises, he compared Persian (with a centuries-old literary tradition...
Their embrace of internet sales appears to have paid off, allowing them to meet surging demand spurred by the Black Lives Matter movement and the holiday shopping season, cementing the loyalty of longtime customers while reaching new ones, and succeeding in taking back dollars that were previously lost to online competitors. - Publishers Weekly
"In the shouty Valhalla of pointlessly destructive literary feuds, a place of honor must go to the verbal duel between the poets Heinrich Heine and August von Platen, which amused and disgusted the German literary world in 1829. Two outsiders — a Jew and a homosexual — resorted to crude stereotypes as they attempted to eject each other from...
Kate Hartson, a fit 67-year-old who once ran a small press specializing in dogs, had all the trappings of a liberal book editor, including an apartment on the Upper East Side and a place in Hampton Bays. But she also seemed to be that rarest of figures in New York media: a true believer in Donald J. Trump, people...
At least in the 18th century. "Wherever they were writing, these women had dared to move out of the conventional female role of service and self-sacrifice to pursue their own needs and drives. Dogged by financial insecurity, ill health, and bad eyesight as a number of them were, it took a special kind of courage to defy the stifling...
One youth poet laureate: "She was given the platform to really pull people in and witness the magic of it, and I think that once you get that, you're going to be hooked." - BBC
Some furloughed workers says they can't make rent, can't buy food, can't make it in general, at 80 percent of their pay - and of course, that means the workers weren't being paid much before the virus hit. From the workers' petition: "It is not our intention to damage or attack our company. We are dedicated to our jobs...
