Four party-affiliated organizations, including the Republican National Committee, collectively spent more than $1 million during the past election cycle mass-purchasing books written by GOP candidates, elected officials and personalities, according to Federal Election Commission expenditure reports. The purchases helped turn several volumes into bestsellers. - Washington Post
“It’s not really polite to tell other writers they’re bad writers, because they tend to fling it back to you. In response, I would say he’s a clunky, self-indulgent writer … His books are all very long and baggy. They’re about his interpretation of Dylan songs … and it’s incredibly boring.” - The Guardian
One of the big literary events of last week? The cover reveal for Sally Rooney's new novel. "In recent years, book cover design has taken on a higher profile, and we may be seeing a new heyday for book design. It was Rooney’s 2018 novel Normal People that Arter believes signalled the shift towards the book cover as a 'cultural phenomenon...
Michael McClure's final editor, Garrett Caples: "As any editor can tell you, turning a manuscript into a book is an affair in itself. Michael’s poetry is not easy to lay out. It’s always centered on the page, but only sometimes dead-centered, where you can just press a button and you’re fine. Often enough, he centered by hand and eye,...
But the prizes are numerous, and many American writers won prizes in many other categories and genres, including poetry, history, current interest (where Isabel Wilkerson's Caste took top place), mystery, horror, and more. A full list is at the link. - Los Angeles Times
The emails appear to come from the winning authors, and to connect to Paypal accounts that could conceivably be associated with them. "Over the past year, at least five British book prizes have been targeted by the same swindle — and one has even paid out. In March 2020, the Rathbones Folio Prize paid £30,000, about $41,000, to a scammer posing...
"Public libraries in the United States started to proliferate in the late 1800s and early 1900s, often founded by women's clubs and other social groups seeking to benefit their communities. Their early focus was on classic literature, which was thought to improve and transform the reader. However, thanks in part to librarianship during the pandemic, a shift occurred...
"Archaeologists digging in the ancient Canaanite settlement of Lachish have unearthed a 3,500-year-old pottery shard inscribed with what they believe is the oldest text found in Israel that was written using an alphabetic script. Earlier Canaanite texts are known, but they were written using hieroglyphs or cuneiform characters." - Haaretz (Israel)
"In the age of texting and emailing, the world is full of Cyranos: Getting quick, surreptitious help writing high-stakes messages has never been easier, whether that means enlisting friends to consult on a flirty note in a dating app or turning to a co-worker for assistance on a sensitive email to your boss. Although this sort of collaboration is...
The newspaper/website raised $9 million through its dedicated US nonprofit alone over the past 12 months, and has been both active and transparent about getting NGO support to cover specific areas such as human rights and climate change. That said, philanthropy is nowhere near being a primary revenue source, "and after one glorious year of not losing money, The...
When they do get reformed, it's usually because autocrats force the changes through (as with Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and Mao Zedong). "A big reason spelling systems never seem to get overhauled in more liberal societies is that those in a position to change the rules have learned the old ones. Put another way, the type of folk who were...
Successive Covid-19 lockdowns in France have given budding writers the time to finally work on that idea for a novel or to polish up an old manuscript languishing in a drawer. As a result, publishers are overwhelmed. Before the pandemic, Gallimard received around 30 manuscripts a day; now they receive around 50. - Yahoo!
New research by a British linguistic anthropologist, Gordon Whittaker, is revealing for the first time that the Aztecs' hieroglyphic writing system was one of the most sophisticated scripts that humanity has ever produced. - The Independent (UK)
There are two fundamental problems with Esperanto as a genuinely global lingua franca. One is that, while it was intended to be have grammar simple and intuitive enough to be mastered quickly, Esperanto is really only intuitive for speakers of European languages; its grammar is alien to native speakers of, for instance, Chinese, Arabic, Yoruba, or Tamil. The other...
Frank Siebert’s writing system was an obstacle for people who were eager to learn the language. “It was a giant pain for everyone,” he said. “Why did this white guy come in and introduce such a nonintuitive alphabet? It was really off-putting. Like, ‘This is the language my grandmother spoke, and now there’s all this technical stuff I have...
