At least in the 18th century. "Wherever they were writing, these women had dared to move out of the conventional female role of service and self-sacrifice to pursue their own needs and drives. Dogged by financial insecurity, ill health, and bad eyesight as a number of them were, it took a special kind of courage to defy the stifling...
One youth poet laureate: "She was given the platform to really pull people in and witness the magic of it, and I think that once you get that, you're going to be hooked." - BBC
Some furloughed workers says they can't make rent, can't buy food, can't make it in general, at 80 percent of their pay - and of course, that means the workers weren't being paid much before the virus hit. From the workers' petition: "It is not our intention to damage or attack our company. We are dedicated to our jobs...
The Wallace Collection "is in internal consultation" about closing the library and archive that was left to the country in 1897. Is that even legal? Will anyone notice during the pandemic? (More than 10,000 people certainly have noticed.) - The Guardian (UK)
Gorman: "I love Black poets. I love that as a Black girl, I get to participate in that legacy. So that’s Yusef Komunyakaa, Sonia Sanchez, Tracy K. Smith, Phillis Wheatley. And then I look to artists who aren’t just poets. While I was writing the Inaugural poem, I was reading a lot of Frederick Douglass, a lot of Winston Churchill,...
Booksellers often distrusted Voltaire, because by modifying his texts and multiplying the editions, he alienated their customers. No one wanted to pay good money for a slightly new version of a book that one had already bought. And some booksellers had become disenchanted with his endless variations on the same themes. - Lapham's Quarterly
There are the endless literary takes. There are Anthony Horowitz’s sequels, or Andrew Lane’s tales of a teenage Holmes. Star basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has written novels about Holmes’s older brother Mycroft; Nancy Springer wrote the Enola Holmes books, giving Holmes and Mycroft a younger sibling. James Lovegrove has combined the worlds of Holmes and HP Lovecraft in the...
Back in 2009, the NFL itself was wondering about that very question. So they asked Ben Zimmer, America's most famous lexicographer, to look into it. Turns out that "hut" in particular is very practical, and it has a pedigree that seems obvious once you think about it. - Mental Floss
Britain's relief package for businesses closed by COVID provides 80% of a furloughed employee's salary, even if that salary is only minimum wage. Workers at the country's most popular bookstore chain, most of whom only make minimum wage or a bit more in normal times, are publicly begging the company to top up the government aid. Management says they'd...
Matty Weingast's The First Free Women: Poems of the Early Buddhist Nuns was marketed by America's leading Buddhist publisher — and hailed by many readers — as a translation of the Therigatha, a collection of Pali verse attributed to the very first community of Buddhist nuns. But as scholars familiar with the actual Therigatha got a look, they saw...
" has doubled down on its decision to publish a poem by a convicted sex offender as part of a special edition dedicated to incarcerated poets, telling critics that 'it is not our role to further judge or punish as a result of their criminal convictions'." - The Guardian
"Finding your thrills in erotic literature, rather than in video scenes, might take a little longer, but it means caring more about the characters involved, which brings more meaning to the sexual scenes," says totally unbiased erotica author Max Sebastian. "I'm not sure than any other literary genre or visual media honestly appreciates male sexuality the way that erotica...
"On its face this list is a little concerning — in a few years, robots might render humans' book-recommending jobs obsolete. I, a human with a book-recommending job, am indeed a little concerned. But if humans aren't stepping up to do the necessary work of recommending 67 books to give a woman, I'm not going to tell a...
"Books are now published in numbers so vast that the writing of one can no longer be presumed to be an act of communication between writer and reader. Yet even books that aren’t read, and stand little chance of ever being read, can have their value." - LitHub
