"By most standards, many of his stories aren't stories at all. They don't have plots, or even realistic, believable characters. … In the manner of visual artists like Duchamp and Rauschenberg, they incorporated all sorts of found materials: snippets from ad copy, old travel guides, textbooks, and instruction manuals, even other writers." - Literary Hub
It comes as little surprise that statistics newly released by the Association of American Publishers found that total sales for the 1,358 publishers that report results to the association jumped 43.7% in April 2021 over the same period last year. - Publishers Weekly
Tayari Jones: "The miracle of Sapphire's gift is that she weaves her sharp social commentary and critique into the fabric of this story without shredding its fibres. This is a novel about people and their problems, not problems and their people.." - The Guardian
In New York, he began producing at an astonishing rate. He contracted to write a story a week for the Sunday World, and he continued to write for magazines. In 1904 alone, he published sixty-six stories. - The New Yorker
By the eighteenth century the asterisk was being deployed as a sort of censorship, covering up letters to represent a d**n vulgar word without actually b**y spelling it out. But, as W. Somerset Maugham points out, this has become somewhat outmoded. - Lapham's Quarterly
This year, it's all Freud. Why? The author of Real Life and Filthy Animals: "At the start of the year I read a lot of American mid-century critics, people like Lionel Trilling and Alfred Kazin. They kept talking about Freud. I realized I should read Freud because he’s had such an impact on contemporary literature. It had immediate dividends....
Ali Smith won for her Summer, the concluding novel in her seasonal quartet - and one that encompasses Brexit, Australian wildfires, COVID-19, and the murder of George Floyd. She cited Orwell’s combination of political writing and art as an inspiration. "The place where these two things meet can’t not be a place of humane – and inhumane – revelation."...
Anne Enright on The Green Road on having a plan for her plot, her idea to write a new King Lear: "The children had other needs. I followed them, let them grow up and, really, given the circumstances – the mother’s vanity, the father’s silence – there was a limit to how far and whether they could get away."...
Why do people pronounce words differently, why does pronunciation change, and why does so-called mispronunciation upset some people to the point of making it possible (and interesting) to compile a top ten list? - The Conversation
"It's hard to make sense of what the NFT creative landscape might mean for otherwise underpaid writers. At once, it's a place for writers to experiment with form, publish and earn money directly and instantly without any traditional publishing gatekeepers. It's also a brand-new subculture with no reliable routes to financial success or readership, cut off from a larger...
"This is the unfortunate fate of most books, even literary prize-winners. … something that Untapped: The Australian Literary Heritage Project is trying to rectify. … Untapped's mission is to digitise 200 of Australia's most important books, preserving them for future generations and making them available through a national network of libraries." - The Guardian
Thomas Swick: "The epigraph page is like a ceremonial gate ushering us into the realm of the author with his or her beloved quotation from a great mind or celebrated scamp that perfectly reflects, or distills, the essence of what follows. … I am always disappointed when I don't find one. It's like looking at a man in a...
These “secular bibles” (the Bible is not one of them) are “books for daily life that ostensibly taught readers one subject, all while subtly instructing them about their role in society and their responsibilities to family and to country.” - The New York Times
