Four debut novelists – Diane Cook, Avni Doshi, Douglas Stuart and Brandon Taylor – are up against the acclaimed Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembga, and the Ethiopian-American Maaza Mengiste for the £50,000 award. - The Guardian
"Whether you love or hate ebooks is probably a function of what books mean to you, and why. … What it means to read, what the experience of reading requires and entails, and what makes it pleasurable or not, is not so easy to pin down." - The Atlantic
Erin Overbey: "As someone who's done the research, seen all the numbers, I can tell you that things are simply not changing quickly enough to present real, concrete progress." - Nieman Lab
Well, you can't say there's nothing to it. But there's not much. And don't even think that playing recordings of the language while you’re lying there unconscious will save you from studying grammar and sentence structure. But yeah, it can help a little. - Mic
What is worse, the meaning of performative in contemporary parlance, while not very precise, is almost exactly the opposite of the word’s original meaning. - Hedgehog Review
So why do we still read him, and why do so many people still flock to his plays, despite their archaisms lichened with footnotes and, to citizens of our ironic century, his easily parodied apostrophizing? Why do we still care? - Washington Post
Last year, The Great Gatsby came out of copyright, and that's a good thing for a The Great Gatsby 2.0 honors seminar at the University of Iowa. - LitHub
Basically, it's weird jobs. "All these different jobs provide existential questions about how the world works and how they work, how they function, I guess." - Slate
"State prosecutors in Nicaragua have ordered the arrest of one of the country’s most prominent writers, Sergio Ramírez, accusing the 78-year-old novelist of inspiring hatred and conspiring to destabilize Nicaragua." Those charges sound common these days in Nicaragua. - LitHub
People sent poems to newspapers and posted poetry on bus shelters. "When we went into Manhattan to see the site where the Twin Towers had once stood, there were poems traced into the ash that covered everything." - LitHub
Weirdly, "the underlying assumption on the part of many publishers seems to be that readers don’t trust translators and won’t buy a book if they realise it’s a translation." - The Guardian (UK)
So many things about the magazine — in both content and design — are recognizable today that it's easy to forget that, when Harold Ross was trying to launch The New Yorker in the 1920s, none of it was there. - Gothamist
Envisioned as a 21st-century online successor to the United States' first anti-slavery newspaper, The Emancipator will operate as a not-for-profit and will focus initially on commentary, with plans to add audio-video, longform nonfiction, data visualization, and history annotation. - Nieman Lab
It was only with the emergence of an artistic movement, beginning around the mid-18th century, that probable language came to be regarded less as the building blocks of composition and more as the too-familiar, the outworn, the boring. - Aeon
