"One of the first lessons you learn in grad school is to hide your personal taste or risk being shamed for liking the wrong sorts of things. Scholars have been conditioned to respond to talk of likes and dislikes with embarrassment, if not outright contempt. The facade of critical detachment may be on the way out, however." - Public...
"There’s always this quality of endeavor about reading—and at the same time, in cognitive terms it’s hard work. When someone reading complex passages of prose—ones, say, that attempt to convey human lives in all their manifold sensuous and intellectual complexity—is placed in a MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scanner, we can see on the machine’s visual display that almost all...
"The suit, filed in the Southern District of New York on January 14 by Seattle-based firm Hagens Berman, … currently names only Amazon as a defendant. However, it labels each of the Big Five publishers — Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, and Penguin Random House — as '“co-conspirators' in an alleged scheme … to squelch consumer price competition...
Especially for some folks, writes former high school English teacher Rachel Klein. "'This is just like 1984!' the right-wing mob cries as it changes the very meaning of words to suit its nefarious aims. 'So Orwellian!' its leaders cry as they demand unthinking fealty to an unhinged, unquestioned leader. … It's a text that allows them to frame themselves...
"Were you to lay this thing out by the sentence, it’d be as close as an array of words could get to strands of pearls. 'The cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment-houses'? That line alone is almost enough to make me quit typing for the rest of my life." - Paris Review
"A Promised Land, the first volume of Barack Obama’s presidential memoirs, was the top print title in 2020, moving nearly 2.6 million copies at outlets that report to NPD BookScan. That number is lower, however, than the 3.4 million copies of Michelle Obama’s Becoming sold in 2018, and the former first lady’s book hit the top 25 overall list...
In the book, La familia grande, prominent attorney Camille Kouchner, the daughter of Bernard Kouchner, former foreign minister and co-founder of Doctors Without Borders, says that her stepfather — political scientist and well-known pundit Olivier Duhamel, chairman (until last week) of the body that oversees the renowned Paris university Sciences Po — sexually abused her twin brother for two...
"A 'lost' recording of Allen Ginsberg reading his then-fresh epic poem 'Howl' in 1956 will be released for the first time in April, thanks to a personal connection between Reed College, where the performance was recorded 65 years ago, and the archivally oriented label Omnivore Recordings." - Variety
“1984” rose to the top of Amazon’s top-selling book list over the weekend. On Monday, it reached the No. 1 spot. Not bad for a book published in 1949. Too bad few people citing the book’s dystopian horrors in earnest seem to understand the usage. - USA Today
"With all major categories posting increases, unit sales of print books rose 8.2% in 2020 over 2019 at outlets that report to NPD BookScan. For the year ended Jan. 2, 2021, units hit 750.9 million, up from 693.7 million the year before. BookScan said the 8.2% gain was the largest annual increase since 2010." - Publishers Weekly
Released as part of the BA's annual membership survey, the number of independent bookshops holding membership at the end of 2020 rose to 967 shops, up from 890 shops in 2019, 883 in 2018 and 868 in 2017. This figure marks the highest number of independent bookshops in BA membership since 2013, as the period of growth was preceded...
Writers have to listen as well as read. "As I read The Waves, I started to 'hear' language as if for the first time. It was as though a window flew open, and the sounds of the author’s words rushed in. I began to notice the sonic patterns of Woolf’s sentences, how she composed a music all her own...
If you have elderly parents and kids to care for, not much. "The pandemic has been through all these different stages and you’re constantly moving between boredom and terror. We recently converted our dining table to a ping-pong table and I felt that was the final stage of getting through the winter." - The Guardian (UK)
That's not the only work making a claim that France has an extremely long way to go in reckoning with gender inequality in every arena of life, including and perhaps especially the arts. The author of I Hate Men: "Feminists have spent a lot of time and energy reassuring men that no, we don’t really hate them, that they’re...
Writer Alyssa Cole explains why it makes sense that romance writers came together to raise money for Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock in the Georgia Senate runoff races (Stacey Abrams, who has engaged in massive voter turnout since her defeat at the ballot box in 2018, is also a romance writer under the pen name Selena Montgomery). "As...
