ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

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Sally Rooney’s Return To Writing

Rooney found immense success with her first two books - so much success that it became a challenge to writing. How did she get back to work? - The New York Times

A Novelist, Keeping Grief Real At 91

Hilma Wolitzer - yes, the mother of Meg - has been publishing books for nearly 50 years. After losing her husband to COVID, she developed a new book. - Los Angeles Times

What Comedian Memoirs Reveal About Race

It's like a mini-sociology course, reading comedian memoirs. Take Tina Fey's Bossypants (which "has a truly jaw-dropping number of racist jokes") or books by Amy Poehler or Amy Schumer and compare them to memoirs by Mindy Kaling, Issa Rae, or Tiffany Haddish. - LitHub

The Comics Industry Seems To Be Diversifying

Graphic novels by Black, Indigenous and other people of color in the 2020s are moving beyond realistic stories and memoir to fantasy and tales shaped by family and society folklore. Says one store owner and publisher, "We've hit these boom and bust cycles. ... My hope for the industry is that this continues. There's room enough for everybody's stories."...

Westerns Have Nearly Unbounded Literary Potential

The history of the genre is problematic at best. "Any writer writing a Western—even a literary Western—knows that they stand on the threshold of creating something that’s equally capable of rocking backward as it is of propelling forward." - LitHub

Eventually, One Gets Old Enough To Really Appreciate Proust

"Like Marcel, we've spent decades building our models of the world, and like him we're starting to see them for the gimcrack that they are. We're beginning to sense just how much effort is involved in holding a person together." - Literary Hub

How Publishing Literature Has Changed

Most authors have day jobs, which is nothing new; Herman Melville worked as a customs inspector. The difference in 2021 is that traditional side careers are less viable and also less “side.” - Vanity Fair

Data Science: The Creepiest, Most Ominous Word In Macbeth

It turns out that Macbeth uncanny flavor springs from the unusual way that Shakespeare deploys one particular word, over and over again. - OneZero

Famous Writers Writing Books That Won’t Be Read For 100 Years

The works will be kept in a room lined with wood from the forest in the Deichman library in Oslo. One hundred years after Future Library was launched, the trees will be felled, and the manuscripts printed for the first time. - The Guardian

A New Canon Of Climate Change Literature

It's part of a growing trend in publishing for books focused on the climate, whether from big hitters such as David Attenborough or Bill Gates, or so-called “cli-fi”, climate fiction." - The Guardian

Origins Of The Term “Woke”

"A quarter of people think of it as a compliment, a quarter of people think it's an insult and the rest either don't know or have never even heard of the term." -BBC

Why Does English Have No Equivalent Of The Académie Française? Pestilence

The Royal Society of London actually did attempt to start one in the winter of 1665, with a committee that included poets Abraham Cowley and John Dryden. Plague broke out in London that spring, everyone who could flee the capital did, and that was that. - Lapham's Quarterly

AI Cloned Val Kilmer’s Voice So He Could Speak After Cancer Surgery

The generated voices have gotten more realistic in the age of deepfakes, a technology that uses AI to manipulate content to look and sound deceptively real. - Washington Post

A New Tool To Try To Decode The Voynich Manuscript?

The 15th-century volume is written in a neat, careful script that bears little resemblance to any natural language, and no one has yet cracked its code. In a Q&A, Yale linguist Claire Bowern talks about approaching the task with computational statistics. - Knowable

Whistled Languages Are Not Dead Yet

In at least 80 cultures worldwide, people have developed whistled versions of the local language when the circumstances call for it. … By studying whistled languages, (linguists) hope to learn more about how our brains extract meaning from the complex sound patterns of speech." - Knowable

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