Among the winners of this literary resurgence is a micro-industry: book subscription services, which curate a selection for you and deliver them to your home. In an era of information overload and a crowded literary market with an often debilitating degree of choice, it isn’t hard to see the attraction of professionals highly attuned to the market – or...
Back in 2014, when the EU passed a law allowing people to petition Google to de-index old news stories about them (e.g., criminal convictions or embarrassing incident from youth that became public), American newsrooms were dead-set against the idea. Now, The Boston Globe, The Plain Dealer of Cleveland, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and some other papers have begun to institute...
"Our data consists of digital editions of 200 works of prize-winning fiction, divided into four subcorpora of equal size: U.S.-American, French, German, and a collection of novels drawn from 19 different "minor" European languages. We ultimately find no evidence to support Casanova's theory that minor literatures are more nationalistic than literature produced within major cultural capitals. Indeed, the evidence...
"Comic creators have been wrestling with contemporary Australia and its identities in a series of publication coming out this year. What they show is a nation divided by racism and on a collision course with dystopia rather than being 'one and free'." - ArtsHub (Australia)
“The best way to think about magazines is as the analog Internet—they’d foster communities of people, just like on social networks,” Steven Lomazow, a seventy-three-year-old New Jersey neurologist who created the exhibition from his personal collection of more than eighty-three thousand magazine issues, said the other day. - The New Yorker
"The texts in The Seventy-Five Pages were written in 1908, around the time Proust began working on In Search of Lost Time, which was published between 1913 and 1927. The papers were part of a collection of documents held by the late publisher Bernard de Fallois, who died in 2018." Gallimard will release the book in France on...
"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
