Words

For you young’uns, back before Stonewall, this was an expression gay men used to identify each other. (If a guy replied “Dorothy who?”, one quickly retreated.) But who was Dorothy — Gale or Parker? – Smithsonian Magazine

“Truck driver shortages, widespread port congestion, and skyrocketing container costs are among the biggest challenges facing the book industry supply chain for the rest of the year and into 2022.” – Publishers Weekly

“For every privileged kid too lazy to write an essay, there was a more complex story. To my surprise, of the hundreds of clients I worked with, many—maybe most—students were simply desperate for the help.” – Slate

“One is a former communist, the other a former mujahid. Both have witnessed and participated in Afghanistan’s turbulent history over the past half century. They have seen the rise and fall of regimes and today sell books about the men who made and unmade them.” – Newlines

To take a genre or mass-market work seriously means recognizing the quiet skill in its pages. – The Atlantic

“[Researchers] have found that the uniquely peculiar way that Danes speak” – mangled consonants and 40 different vowel sounds – “seems to make it difficult for Danish children to learn their native language – and this challenges some central tenets of the science of language.” – The Conversation

Author T.J. Newman: “I said [to a pilot friend], ‘What would you do if your family was kidnapped and you were told that if you didn’t crash the plane, they’d be killed?’ I knew by the look on his face that I’d struck a nerve. He was terrified. He didn’t have an answer. And I knew I had a story.” – The New York Times

Writers need agents more than agents need writers. They have needed them since the late 19th century, when an increasingly literate public fed by the magazines and single-volume prints made possible by the invention of Linotype printing created a lucrative industry. – The Guardian

“The distinction really is between social media natives who don’t really treasure free speech because they’ve had a lifetime’s worth and think it’s overrated, and people of an older generation who didn’t have access to the means of cultural production and needed the patronage of newspapers and publishing houses to get their voices heard.” – The Observer

“By most standards, many of his stories aren’t stories at all. They don’t have plots, or even realistic, believable characters. … In the manner of visual artists like Duchamp and Rauschenberg, they incorporated all sorts of found materials: snippets from ad copy, old travel guides, textbooks, and instruction manuals, even other writers.” – Literary Hub

It comes as little surprise that statistics newly released by the Association of American Publishers found that total sales for the 1,358 publishers that report results to the association jumped 43.7% in April 2021 over the same period last year. – Publishers Weekly

Tayari Jones: “The miracle of Sapphire’s gift is that she weaves her sharp social commentary and critique into the fabric of this story without shredding its fibres. This is a novel about people and their problems, not problems and their people..” – The Guardian

In New York, he began producing at an astonishing rate. He contracted to write a story a week for the Sunday World, and he continued to write for magazines. In 1904 alone, he published sixty-six stories. – The New Yorker

By the eighteenth century the asterisk was being deployed as a sort of censorship, covering up letters to represent a d**n vulgar word without actually b**y spelling it out. But, as W. Somerset Maugham points out, this has become somewhat outmoded. – Lapham’s Quarterly

This year, it’s all Freud. Why? The author of Real Life and Filthy Animals: “At the start of the year I read a lot of American mid-century critics, people like Lionel Trilling and Alfred Kazin. They kept talking about Freud. I realized I should read Freud because he’s had such an impact on contemporary literature. It had immediate dividends. I read the new Rachel Cusk novel, Second Place, and it was really Freudian to me.” – MSN (Boston Globe)

Ali Smith won for her Summer, the concluding novel in her seasonal quartet – and one that encompasses Brexit, Australian wildfires, COVID-19, and the murder of George Floyd. She cited Orwell’s combination of political writing and art as an inspiration. “The place where these two things meet can’t not be a place of humane – and inhumane – revelation.” – The Guardian (UK)

The novelists hope: “As long as we continue to think and to tell stories, we are not necessarily doomed.” Perhaps. – The Guardian (UK)

Anne Enright on The Green Road on having a plan for her plot, her idea to write a new King Lear: “The children had other needs. I followed them, let them grow up and, really, given the circumstances – the mother’s vanity, the father’s silence – there was a limit to how far and whether they could get away.” – The Guardian (UK)

Why do people pronounce words differently, why does pronunciation change, and why does so-called mispronunciation upset some people to the point of making it possible (and interesting) to compile a top ten list? – The Conversation

“It’s hard to make sense of what the NFT creative landscape might mean for otherwise underpaid writers. At once, it’s a place for writers to experiment with form, publish and earn money directly and instantly without any traditional publishing gatekeepers. It’s also a brand-new subculture with no reliable routes to financial success or readership, cut off from a larger writing market and culture that doesn’t understand it, raising knotty questions about what elements of writing are truly valuable to readers. For some, it’s exciting. But it’s also chaos.” – Literary Hub

“This is the unfortunate fate of most books, even literary prize-winners. … [That’s] something that Untapped: The Australian Literary Heritage Project is trying to rectify. … Untapped’s mission is to digitise 200 of Australia’s most important [out-of-print] books, preserving them for future generations and making them available through a national network of libraries.” – The Guardian

Thomas Swick: “The epigraph page is like a ceremonial gate ushering us into the realm of the author with his or her beloved quotation from a great mind or celebrated scamp that perfectly reflects, or distills, the essence of what follows. … I am always disappointed when I don’t find one. It’s like looking at a man in a suit who’s not wearing a tie.” (Just as long as it’s not in Latin.) – Literary Hub

These “secular bibles” (the Bible is not one of them) are “books for daily life that ostensibly taught readers one subject, all while subtly instructing them about their role in society and their responsibilities to family and to country.” – The New York Times