Words

The discomfort we have over hearing our voices in audio recordings is probably due to a mix of physiology and psychology. For one, the sound from an audio recording is transmitted differently to your brain than the sound generated when you speak. – The Conversation

“First editions of Palladio and Alberti as well as 16th century printings of Vitruvius — oh, and first editions of Piranesi etchings that once belonged to the House of Lords. All of these sit behind glass and wood cabinets in an English country house library hidden within the I-Am-America-Hear-Me-Roar Gilded Age splendor.” – The Daily Beast

The acclaimed but controversial bio was dropped by its original publisher after several women came forward with serious allegations of sexual misconduct on Bailey’s part. The book is now in the hands of Skyhorse Publishing, which picked up Woody Allen’s recent memoir after Hachette cancelled it and has also released titles by former Trump attorney Michael Cohen, political dirty trickster and pardoned felon Roger Stone, and lawyer-to-famous-pariahs Alan Dershowitz. – The Guardian

Its history is peppered with financial crises and near-death experiences. Perhaps it was placed on earth to make “righteousness readable” (in the centenary words of Lord Robert Cecil), but the paper has nearly always struggled to make it remunerative. – New York Review of Books

Raven Leilani for Luster, her debut novel (which was also awarded the admiration of former President Barack Obama, but that’s a different kind of prize). – LitHub

That is, the ’20s that were a century ago. Princess Mysteria’s columns in The Defender “presented a stark contrast with other advice writing of the time, and not only because white advice columnists tended to toe a racist line when it came to matters of segregation and racial hierarchy, and rarely printed letters from Black correspondents. The columnist believed in women’s capacity for independence, and she addressed topics other columns wouldn’t touch, including premarital sex, rape, and abortion.” – Slate

Paris has lost 30 percent of its independent bookshops in the last 20 years, despite a lot of government intervention: “Small shops qualify for subsidies. And rents are stabilized in pricey areas of the city. To keep book prices from dropping too low, the French parliament passed a law restricting Amazon from offering free delivery and a 5% discount across France.” – NPR

Hollie McNish, who once changed her name to “Hollie Poetry” – what she now calls “a search engine name” – says that sex and writing are linked: “All energy drives are linked. I’d call it an orgasm drive – an urge to make something specific from a dream inside your head or skin.” – The Guardian (UK)

And it was one exacerbated by the virus – loneliness. – The New York Times

Her newest book is a deliberate picture of how America wasn’t ever really great at all for quite a few people. And what’s she considering now? She thinks we’re all in recovery from the former president. “This is a person who colonised our brains for years. I don’t think there was a day in the last four years when we were not constantly reacting or commenting or reading about the things he was saying and doing, or weren’t being affected in a visceral way by his actions and his whims, his moods and emotions.And suddenly they’re just gone? It feels very surreal.”- The Guardian (UK)

It came from a graveyard. Or maybe some public privies. In any case, the water was very, very bad. – LitHub

Fifty years on (as is the rule), documents on the deliberations for the 1970 prize have just been made public, and some committee members were genuinely concerned that awarding the Soviet dissident writer, who had already spent time in the gulag, would put him in danger. While Solzhenitsyn did win that year, he didn’t collect his medal until after he was expelled from the USSR in 1974. – The Guardian

“Quantifying, dissecting and broadcasting our most-loved hobbies sucks the joy out of them. I find myself glancing towards the corner of the page to see how much I’ve read. … Even when absorbed in the climax of a story, one eye is always on my proximity to the end, when I’ll be able to post it all to Goodreads. … [It’s] far more performative than I have previously admitted to myself: I love reading, but I also love the feeling of people thinking I’m well read.” – The Guardian

Árni Magnússon, who undertook Iceland’s first-ever census and land survey, was a near-obsessive manuscript collector; he gathered many thousands of medieval documents, sagas, and other materials and sent them back to his house in Copenhagen. And in 1728, when the worst fire in the city’s history and destroyed more than a quarter of the buildings and nearly every book in town, Magnússon managed to get most of the manuscripts (though none of his own books) out of his house before it collapsed in flames, rescuing a huge portion of what we have of old Icelandic literature today. – Literary Hub

“Those who seek to ban my book and others like it are trying to exploit fear — fear about the realities that books like mine expose, fear about desire and sex and love — and distort it into something ugly, in an attempt to wish away queer experiences.” – The New York Times

Under dispute is whether or not Powell’s is obliged to honor employees’ prior seniority, salaries, and benefits. The union says that the store, in a string of emails last year, had agreed to honor the employees’ work history upon rehiring. The store, on the other hand, asserts that, since more than 12 months have passed, they are under no such obligation, and has insisted that former employees reapply for their old jobs. – Publishers Weekly

“As we see it, one of the goals of the magazine is to help our readers remain open to the possibility that facets of everyday life and culture they might be inclined to trivialize or look down upon may have something to teach us. This doesn’t mean we don’t allow criticism, of course; criticism is part of taking something seriously.” – LitHub

The unassuming 18th-century townhouse at 15 Usher’s Island is where Joyce’s great-aunts ran a music school, and their annual Epiphany dinner was the model for the gathering in the final story of Dubliners. Two Irish investors who bought the house for €650,000 (cheap by current Dublin standards) have gotten permits to convert the four-story building into a 56-bed tourist hostel — and outraged writers from Edna O’Brien and John Banville in Ireland to Rachel Kushner and Salman Rushdie abroad have signed an angry petition put together by Colm Tóibín. – The New York Times

“Like many systems that appear meticulous, the writing of citations is a subjective art. Never more so than in fiction, where citation is an entirely other kind of animal, not required or even expected, except in the “acknowledgments” page, which is often a who’s who of the publishing world. (Also a good way to find out who is married to whom.) But in the last two decades, bibliographies and sources cited pages have increasingly cropped up in the backs of novels.” – The Drift

“Take a bunch of clever, ambitious people and tell them to get as many papers published as possible while still technically passing muster through peer review … and what do you think is going to happen? Of course the system gets gamed: The results from one experiment get sliced up into a dozen papers, statistics are massaged to produce more interesting results, and conclusions become exaggerated. The most prolific authors have found a way to publish more than one scientific paper a week. Those who can’t keep up might hire a paper mill to do (or fake) the work on their behalf.” – The Atlantic

Dickens’ 17-year-old sister-in-law collapsed one night as she returned from the theatre, and died in the arms of the writer. “A failure of Hogarth’s heart was blamed, but today an aneurism, or stroke, is suspected as the more likely cause of death. It was a shock that altered Dickens for ever, throwing a shadow over his imaginative life.” – The Observer (UK)

Masterful essay writer Elissa Mashuta: “This is the dilemma at the heart of the process: writing would be easier if I had an assured end point to aim for, but the essay only works if I begin without knowing what I’ll find as I advance through the paragraphs. I want to control everything, but the essay won’t let me.” – LitHub

Those who read the book or saw the movie may not quite believe it, but the real-life case from which the author drew her inspiration was far worse. Then there were her own kids. “I had three and a half years’ worth of things to say. About what a huge gap separates an adult and a small child, with only curiosity, humour and love to bridge it. About how a mother is her baby’s captor and prisoner, sometimes both at the same time. About how you long to give your growing kid freedom while somehow, impossibly, keeping them perfectly safe.” – The Guardian (UK)

“Newsletters began in mid-fifteenth-century Venice. Subscribers would receive handwritten letters twice a week rounding up interesting events. Sixteenth-century merchants used similar news sources to keep track of exchange rates, taxes, and other business news. The form’s popularity expanded in England after the country’s first postal service took off around 1660. This opened the door to news writers, who could use the mail to gather information from distant correspondents and then send the information to readers on a predictable schedule.” – JSTOR Daily