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A History Of Spelling Reform (Please Make It Simpler!)

In the early 20th century, the industrialist Andrew Carnegie provided the seed money for the Simplified Spelling Board, which, unlike the Spelling Reform Association, was committed to subtracting letters from the alphabet rather than adding them. - The Wall Street Journal

Why “Close Reading” Can Miss The Plot

When you studied literature in school or university, I expect that you were taught, implicitly or explicitly, that this plot-focused way of reading was simplistic, and that you were trained to read in new ways where plot was largely irrelevant. The message is: Only amateurs read for the plot. - Public Books

Why The “Odyssey” Is All Over The Place Right Now

“The Iliad is the poem of death. Death stalks its lines, blood soaks it. Countless young men appear in the poem only to be cut down. … But at the heart of the Odyssey there is life, and survival. This survival isn’t pretty, or comforting, or dignified.” - The Guardian

On The “Odyssey” And Its Ubiquity And Oddity

“We can read the Odyssey today with a sense of déjà vu: we feel we know these narratives, we have met these characters, we recognize these themes. Yet the epic of Odysseus’s return is, in many ways, as unfathomably strange to us as the one-eyed giant Cyclops was to its hero.” - Literary Hub

National Geographic Says These Are The World’s Best Book Towns

By definition, a book town is “a small, preferably rural, town or village in which secondhand and antiquarian bookshops are concentrated… available to everyone…” Today, there are dozens of towns with the designation. - National Geographic

Inside The Rise And Fall Of YA Fiction

The rise of more inclusive YA has felt as much like a seismic shift as “The Hunger Games” did back in the day. It’s given teen books a new relevance, and a new energy. Alas, sales of young-adult fiction have been declining since 2021, in part due to well-organized efforts to ban books. - Los Angeles Times

Are Em-Dashes Really A Sign Of AI-Generated Content?

If so — not to put too fine a point on it — is this a sign that the content AI stole, “scraped," from literary writers might have used the em-dash more often than it’s used in everyday communication? - Rolling Stone

An Author’s Desire To Be Seen, And Also Never To Be Seen

Kaliane Bradley: “There was the absolute dread that it would go to people I know and respect and they’d talk to one another and say: ‘God, did you get that book? It’s shit, isn’t it? What do we tell her?’” - The Guardian (UK)

The Problem For American Literature Under Someone Who Doesn’t Understand Soft Power

“The Trump administration, caring little for democracy and focused on hardness, is immune to the idea that literature, a supposedly feminizing kind of art, could ever be useful.” - LitHub

This Person Has Listened To The Great Gatsby Two Hundred Times

“Gatsby has now laid down roots in my brain — even into my dreams. In a way, that’s not just true of me but of the entire culture.” - The New York Times

A Quick Cure For Writer’s Block

Author Catherine Ryan Howard says the best cure, in her experience, is having to pay the rent. - Irish Times (Internet Archive)

The Naval Academy Library Dumps Maya Angelou But Keeps Hitler

Clearly, it’s so much more dangerous to read about a young woman coming of age than to read Mein Kampf. - The New York Times

I Found Robert Caro’s Unfinished Novel

The great historian had published some fiction while a student at Princeton, but nothing since then. While doing research in Caro’s archives, however, journalist Chris Heath discovered the drafts of a mid-career novel Caro had worked on but never finished. Naturally, Heath talked with Caro about it. - Smithsonian Magazine

Thomas Pynchon’s First New Book In A Decade

Shadow Ticket, due out in October, will be the American novelist’s 10th book. Like his previous two, Inherent Vice (2009) and Bleeding Edge (2013), this new work is a noir novel about a private eye. - The Guardian

So Much Literature Is Built On The Premise Of Sexual Jealousy. But Today’s Students…

"Sexual jealousy is an emotion that was once thought to be so universal, such a commonplace experience of a person in love, that no one would think it needed explaining." But we "did not anticipate a world in which jealousy within a relationship would evolve into something that could be analogized to consumer rivalry." - Hedgehog Review

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