In To the Lighthouse, "these dishes are described with great fanfare but, as any competent home cook will know, beef stews are neither challenging to make nor impressive to look at. ... They do not require, as Woolf’s depiction would have it, a series of complicated steps." - The Paris Review
For decades, the early 20th century fiction written by Yiddish women was "dismissed by publishers as insignificant or unmarketable to a wider audience." Luckily, "there has been a surge of translations of female writers by Yiddish scholars devoted to keeping the literature alive." - The New York Times
"New narrative booms. Its dissociative forms and themes — the anxiety/bliss of romance/sex, psychic roleplay, identity-in-ideology, dream states, trauma, more sex — now serve a community of passion addicts, haunted memoirists, and mental thrill-riders hungering for a higher high." - Los Angeles Review of Books
Yes, partly because the film absolutely bombed at the box office. "Wonder Boys succeeds. It succeeds because it failed, and because at heart it’s about failure. And writers are connoisseurs of failure." - LitHub
The erasure of collaborators - and the sometimes terrible behavior to others - is just the tip of the iceberg. See: A new novel about Erik Satie for something a bit more balanced. - The Atlantic
"The elimination of Maus from a Tennessee county language arts curriculum does not live up to its more hysterical billing. It is not a ban, and it does not seem to be motivated by outright bigotry." However: There's something far more sinister on the horizon. - Slate
"In Wordle, your own language skills, memory, and the Wordle dictionary mean that no human (with the possible exception of an eccentric memory champ) could correctly identify 12,972 eligible words in as many guesses." - Slate
Even as international travel restrictions are being lifted, some writers say they will continue to carry on with virtual events because they are more convenient and accessible. They say this has the additional benefit of leaving them with more time to focus on their craft. - BBC
Four scholars offer their answers in a roundtable — including the observation that, in the rare instances when that does happen, the book itself isn't always very good. (Also, no cheating by calling the King James Bible literature.) - History Today
"That Ulysses was an event nearly everyone will agree. However, can we say even now, a century later, what kind of event it really was in Irish or world literary terms? And is Ulysses really a novel at all in any case?" - Dublin Review of Books
The Betrayal of Anne Frank, by Canadian author Rosemary Sullivan, released on Jan. 18, caused a sensation when it said investigators had named Arnold van den Bergh as the main suspect. Other researchers later criticized the findings, saying they were "full of errors." - CBC
The response of artists and writers was to remake their work: a way of seeking either to control the strange and uncontrollable, or simply to portray it more truthfully. - BBC
Says one puzzle constructor, "It becomes an endless series of judgment calls. Is this slang term offensive? Is that world leader merely unpleasant, or too toxic to even mention?" Adds one maven, "You have this responsibility to be aware of what it is that you're feeding those people." - Kotaku
The book, “The Adventures of Dillon Helbig’s Crismis” by the author “Dillon His Self,” had drawn so much attention by the end of January that 56 people were on the waiting list to check it out, said Alex Hartman, the manager of the library branch. - The New York Times
