Edgar Allan Poe ended his short story with "Darkness and Decay and the Red Death illimitable dominion over all." Others, from Daniel Defoe to Mary Shelley to Jack London, leave only a few survivors behind. José Saramago and Albert Camus handle things more subtly but perhaps more painfully. Jill Lepore gives us a look. - The New Yorker
Because we use screens for social purposes and for amusement, we all — adults and children — get used to absorbing online material, much of which was designed to be read quickly and casually, without much effort. And then we tend to use that same approach to on-screen reading with harder material that we need to learn from, to...
"For a few decades in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, authors from across ideologies and genres published stories that today would be called 'cli-fi,' or climate fiction." Among those authors were no less than Mark Twain and Jules Verne (who wrote about industrialists intentionally heating the Arctic in order to mine coal). - JSTOR Daily
The magazine, co-founded and long run by the late George Plimpton, "has a new editor, only the sixth since being founded in 1953, but its third since 2017. Emily Stokes, currently a senior editor at The New Yorker, succeeds Emily Nemens, who announced earlier this month that she was leaving to work on a new book." - AP
"In a town under siege from Assad's regime, a small group of revolutionaries found a new mission: to build a library from books rescued from the rubble. For those stranded in the city, books offered an imaginative escape from the horrors of war." - The Guardian
As libraries continue to examine their role in digital life, they recognize that one of their critical and unique weapons is the hands-on, brains-on human capital of the librarians and library staff. They have been helping people research and navigate through their online lives for a long time. With libraries’ well-earned and precious reputation as a trusted place with...
Don't just salivate over Ulysses, The Wasteland, and the soon-to-come centennial of 1922. Where would modernist English literature be without Great Gatsby? Mrs. Dalloway? John Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer? Or Hemingway's In Our Time? - The New York Times
TikTok might not be the place we think of immediately for book reviews - but a lot of bookbuyers - that is, young women - do. "Miriam Parker, a vice president and associate publisher at Ecco, which released The Song of Achilles , said the company saw sales spike on Aug. 9 but couldn’t figure out why. It eventually...
And many Black authors resent the implication. Yaa Gyasi on her time touring the United States after her book Homegoing came out: "I was exhausted, not just by the travel but by something that is more difficult to articulate – the dissonance of the black spotlight, of being revered in one way and reviled in another, a revulsion that...
And other plays too. This isn't a "Shakespeare didn't write his own plays" theory; it's a theory about an Elizabethan playwright named Thomas North - and Thomas North's cousin George. - Boston Globe
This is not great. "The past year ... has laid bare just how perilous a job you like, or even love, can be when you’re working without the most basic of safety nets. This fragility is something that Strand employees have always known — they work in retail, after all. Before, though, the job had just enough perks, just...
"In one camp, translators argue that the issue is representation in the field, not whether a white translator is incapable of translating an author of a different background. Another contingent believes the incident signals a threatening policing of who is eligible to translate, a step closer to a world where the validity of one’s experience and ideas is contingent...
The act and the art of translation requires the permission to transcend borders, the permission to make mistakes, and the permission to be repeated, by anyone who feels the tempestuous tug, and the clarion call, of the unfamiliar. To rein in such liberty through categories and compartments that imprison our creativity is a disservice to the human imagination. -...
Being that the South has been open to the rest of the world while the North has been sealed off for seven decades, the Korean spoken on the two sides of the DMZ is rather different. South Korea's Unification Ministry has been hoping that an "inter-Korean dictionary" — launched in 2005 and currently getting a new push from Seoul...
