Words

Northern Hemisphere summer reading plans, here you go. – The New York Times

Komunyakaa: Writing poetry “feels like one has been chosen as a caretaker of observation. There’s a certain reality, but also there’s a certain kind of dreaming, and that place takes us someplace that we never dreamt of.” – NPR

For decades, the literary world disdained historical fiction. “It has been seen as its own fusty fashion, relentlessly uncontemporary and easy to caricature, filled with mothballed characters who wear costumes rather than clothes, use words like ‘Prithee!’ while having modern-day thoughts, and occasionally encounter villains immediately recognizable by their yellow teeth or suspicious smell. What light could such novels possibly shed on the present day?” Ask Hilary Mantel. – The New York Times

The writers, contributors, and freelance editorial workers are prepared to produce a strike issue – or a Labor Peace issue. It all depends on how negotiations end up. – LitHub

Taylor’s Real Life hit many “best of” lists for 2020, and a collection of loosely linked short stories comes out this month. “My most formative early reading was the Bible, which haunts me still, and the first author I loved was Pat Conroy, because the lyrical language of The Prince of Tides sounded so much like the Bible. I tried to imitate that intensity when I started writing, and then I was like, no; a lot of black writers get called raw and visceral because they write lyrically, and if I could remove that from the equation, it would be nice.” – The Guardian (UK)

It’s unknown how many books are affected by the bug. The number of ratings per book lost seem, without any further information, to be random. Authors took to Twitter with their worries, because for authors, the loss of reviews and ratings is in no way a simple error or a minor issue, as the platform is a powerful tool for book discoverability and promotion. – Publishers Weekly

Graeme Wood, who studied both languages himself, talked with a Princeton professor (who did not wish to be named) who says that the department expects no drop in the actual number of students who study Latin and Greek — but that there may be majors who don’t need to learn the languages, just as not all English majors need to learn Anglo-Saxon. – The Atlantic

“Oxford University’s right to print books was first recognised in 1586, in a decree from the Star Chamber. But the centuries-old printing history of Oxford University Press will end this summer, after the publishing house announced the last vestige of its printing arm was closing. The closure of Oxuniprint, which will take place on 27 August subject to consultation with employees, will result in the loss of 20 jobs.” – The Guardian

Complaining about other, more successful writers is one of the most popular activities on Twitter, as is devising elaborately exacting standards of correct speech and vigorously, if informally, prosecuting those who violate them. – Slate

“No one now can go on insisting on the usual beneficial effects of literature without taking serious and systematic account of Currie’s arguments. Not to do so in future will count as intellectual negligence.” – Notre Dame Philosophical Review

The magazine’s salaried employees formed a union three years ago and have been negotiating for higher pay (at a publication known for low wages) ever since. About 100 of them went to the street outside the Greenwich Village townhouse of Condé Nast’s global editorial director on Tuesday, carrying signs in their publication’s recognizable headline typeface reading “Fair pay now” and “You can’t eat prestige” and chanting “Bosses wear Prada, workers get nada.” (The New Yorker is the one Condé Nast title that Wintour does not supervise.) – The New York Times

The Iliad and the Odyssey weren’t written by Homer, because they weren’t written at all. They were products of an oral tradition, performed by generations of anonymous Greek bards who gradually shaped them into the epics we know today. – The New Yorker

“Even though people did not … personally identify as nonbinary in the way we understand it today (though some identified as ‘neuter’), neutral pronouns existed — as did an understanding that the language we had to describe gender was insufficient. … English speakers have proposed 200 to 250 pronouns since the 1780s. Although most petered out almost immediately after their introduction, a few took on lives of their own.” – The Atlantic

“The policy change at Princeton presumes the existence of various potential contributions that classics students knowing no Latin or Greek could have been making to classroom discussions before now. What are those contributions?” – The Atlantic

Author and illustrator Jansson found her dream island when she was in her ’50s. “Klovharun in the Finnish archipelago is tiny – some 6,000 sq metres – and isolated, ‘a rock in the middle of nowhere,’ according to Jansson’s niece, Sophia. It has scarcely any foliage, no running water and no electricity. Yet for Jansson, it was an oasis. For 18 years she and her partner Tuulikki Pietilä spent long summers there, heading out from Helsinki as soon as the ice broke in April, leaving only in early October. The island meant ‘privacy, remoteness, intimacy, a rounded whole without bridges or fences.'” – The Guardian (UK)

Happy Pride Month! Um: The author of the groundbreaking Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and many other experimental, daring works wrote on Twitter, ““Absolutely hated the cosy little domestic blurbs on my new covers. Turned me into wimmins fiction of the worst kind! Nothing playful or strange or the ahead of time stuff that’s in there. So I set them on fire.” – The Guardian (UK)

Or so says Zakiya Dalila Harris, the author of The Other Black Girl. The book is a combined thriller and social satire that was indeed inspired by Harris’ experiences. “Part of me enjoyed editing and I felt I was good at it, but it’s also an exhausting job for an entry-level person in terms of the pay. I was also one of the very few black people in the company – it wasn’t as bad as Nella in the book, but I was the only black woman in editorial in a full-time position for a while. I thought: why does it feel like we’re living in 1955 still, in terms of what we value?” – The Guardian (UK)

Sounds ridiculous, right? What do literary novels have in common with Avengers or WandaVision? Benjamin Percy says his Comet Cycle came about because he wanted to “go wild, do something different, change shit up, and create an experience—from a creative and business perspective—that was lit from beginning to end.” – LitHub

In the U.S., people like nonfiction, especially self-help – and cookbooks, and sex advice. The books in the best-seller canon “are not books so much as appliances. They are not read; they are used. And probably many of them have been bought by people who do not otherwise buy many books.” – The New Yorker

“Authors have little interest in writing them, editors have little interest in publishing them, and — though the hypothesis has yet to be tested — it’s widely assumed that readers would have little interest in buying them. In many ways, the dynamic represents a microcosm of the current political moment: Facing a new president whose relative dullness is his superpower, the American right has gone hunting for richer targets to elevate.” – The Atlantic

“The $7 million lawsuit … alleges that Dirk Obbink stole 32 items from the Egyptian Exploration Society at the University of Oxford’s Sackler Library and sold them to Hobby Lobby, the nationwide arts and crafts chain owned by an evangelical Christian family,” which was trying to rapidly assemble a collection for the Museum of the Bible, which it opened in DC in 2017. – Artnet

“Linguists trace this shift to Philadelphia’s elite schools. Any way of speaking that falls outside the norm is viewed negatively in certain settings, so students at these schools may feel pressured to adapt the less noticeable mid-Atlantic accent. … If the trend continues, the classic Philly accent could become extinct within two decades.” – Mental Floss

This single cookbook defined American womanhood, but there were a few issues. For one thing, Betty Crocker wasn’t a person. – LitHub