Words

We seem to project enormously intense feelings onto books, feelings that make us protective of them and furious toward those we perceive as threatening them. We think of our books as symbols of our taste, our intellect, our moral vigor. And when we hold books in such high esteem, those who treat them as objects rather than as symbols become infidels. – Vox

Arthur Brand has recovered one of the oldest surviving copies of the Divan of Hafez, one of the most important and beloved works in all of Persian literature. The volume was the only still-missing item from a collection of manuscripts stolen in 2007 from the estate of a collector in Munich; the rest had been found, along with their thief, in 2011. – artnet

Students of Asian American literature have often been far more familiar with what is wrong with Aiiieeeee! than with Aiiieeeee! itself. From the earliest days of its publication, many Asian Americans did not hear themselves in the scream of Aiiieeeee!, did not see themselves in the “our” of its “fifty years of our whole voice.” They chafed against what they saw as the editorial limiting of “authentic” Asian Americanness to “Filipino, Chinese, and Japanese Americans, American born and raised.” This act of border drawing, by excluding Pacific Islander, Korean, and South Asian Americans (among others), further contributed to critics’ rejection of Aiiieeeee!’s brand of Asian American cultural nationalism as more divisive than unifying. – Paris Review

“Dutch design company Jora Vision will use Pushkin’s works as inspiration for the 17,000-square-meter Lukomorye park, named after the mythical Slavic land in which Pushkin’s fairy tales take place. … The amusement park will consist of three zones — a palace, a city and a harbor — each based on imaginary places in Pushkin’s stories. The park will also feature a swan lake, a fairytale forest and a ‘yarmarka,’ or Russian fair market. ” – The Moscow Times

The conventional wisdom that now governs book publishing—that things are, for the first time in a long time, not that bad—is wrong. At the very least, it overlooks the fact that Amazon has spent the last decade accumulating yet more power and leverage, and that its ambitions have since moved past simply being the world’s largest bookstore. On Tuesday evening, The Wall Street Journal surveyed one of the most important recent developments in the industry: Amazon is finally publishing work by some of America’s biggest authors. – The New Republic

Normally terrific, WaPo book critic Ron Charles goes lightly on Amazon, whose CEO owns the paper. So it’s time to consider some issues he missed. “E-books and audiobooks have greatly improved the reading experience over the past decade for those who can afford to pay Amazon for Kindle and Audible digital books. We have yet to figure out what the cost of Amazon’s dominance of e-books and audiobooks will be to the broader digital book ecosystem.” – Inside Higher Ed

And actually, Jacqueline Woodson says, that’s a good thing to know on a deep level, so that she doesn’t only despair at lead poisoning in Flint or the rise of asthma after 9/11. “It’s so important to know that whatever moment we’re in, we’re not in it for the first time. … Knowing that something like this has happened before, and that we survived it, is really important for me as a writer.” – The Guardian (UK)

Toronto’s libraries have increased program attendance by more than 30 percent in the past decade, but funding has not kept up – not at all. The libraries say they want to get going on a plan to stay open longer (especially on Sundays) and provide more programs. Will Toronto come through? – Toronto Star

You’ve probably heard of the French Resistance, but do you know about the great-grandmothers of Ethiopia in 1935? Ethiopian novelist Maaza Mengiste’s second novel (partly) concerns the women who fought back against Italy in its invasion of Ethiopia – and she went to Italy to learn more At a reading, she met a man who said, “‘My father dropped poison on your people. How do I ask for your forgiveness?’ And he started crying. It was at that moment that I said to myself: ‘My God, this history is not done, this war that feels distant but is not distant.'” – The Observer (UK)

“Fifty years after Samuel Beckett won the Nobel prize for literature, newly opened archives reveal the serious doubts the committee had over giving the award to an author they felt held a ‘bottomless contempt for the human condition’.” – The Guardian

The first way of reading is non-evaluative, at least at the level of craft or technique; the second is only evaluative, and wagers everything on technical success, on questions of craft and aesthetic achievement. – LitHub

The store hadn’t had any sales that day, perhaps for the first time ever, says the manager. He sent out a tweet and Twitter readers responded with a thousand pounds worth of orders. – The Guardian

Under the parental oversight of public libraries bill, which has been proposed by Missouri Republican Ben Baker, panels of parents would be elected to evaluate whether books are appropriate for children. Public hearings would then be held by the boards to ask for suggestions of potentially inappropriate books, with public libraries that allow minors access to such titles to have their funding stripped. Librarians who refuse to comply could be fined and imprisoned for up to one year. – The Guardian

The consequence of identifying so closely with the literary community is that critics often don’t feel that they’re part of the reviewing apparatus. They feel like they’re subject to it. This has two consequences. First, they live in a certain fear of it, because the kind of reception that their future books will have might be contingent on their relationship with the person they are reviewing. Second, there’s a lot of insistence that the book reviewing world is going through some challenges, but there’s very little consensus about who is responsible for making changes. – American Scholar

“In July, the audiobook company owned by Amazon announced Captions, an additional function for the existing app that would allow customers to read the text as it was read, as well as looking up words and translating them. … Seven publishers, including the ‘Big Five’ – Penguin Random House, Hachette, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins and Macmillan – sued Audible in August, a move that was also backed by bodies representing authors and agents,” all of whom maintained that the captioning was unauthorized reproduction of the printed text. – The Guardian

“Between 1992 and 2017, archivist Greg Priore smuggled some 300 documents worth more than $8 million out of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, where he served as sole manager of the rare books room. … He then delivered the items to bookseller John Schulman, who subsequently re-sold them to unsuspecting clients. On Monday, the two men pleaded guilty … [and] will be sentenced on April 17 of this year.” – Smithsonian Magazine

The more popular the book, the more pervasive the SlideShare piracy. Searches for the top five fiction and nonfiction books on the New York Times bestseller list (which includes authors ranging from Malcolm Gladwell to Delia Owens to Ronan Farrow) produce multiple pages of pirated e-book links on SlideShare for each title. – Fast Company

“In fact, while his novels and stories may have won him global renown, journalism was his first calling. Not only was it foundational to his development as a writer, but it also remained integral to his work and public persona throughout his life, from his early days as a cub reporter in Colombia until his death in Mexico in 2014.” – The Nation

“Goodnight Moon, by Margaret Wise Brown, would have made the Top 10 list and might have topped it, the library notes, but for the fact that ‘influential New York Public Library children’s librarian Anne Carroll Moore disliked the story so much when it was published in 1947 that the Library didn’t carry it … until 1972.’ Who was Anne Carroll Moore, and what was her problem with the great Goodnight Moon?” Dan Kois looks into the matter. – Slate

‘The’ tops the league tables of most frequently used words in English, accounting for 5% of every 100 words used. “‘The’ really is miles above everything else,” says Jonathan Culpeper, professor of linguistics at Lancaster University. But why is this? – BBC

“Any man who’s ever killed a chicken knows that it’s best not to look it in the eye. [With his Sportsman’s Notebook, Ivan] Turgenev forced his fellow landowners to do that, look the serfs in the eye. Alexander II acknowledged the role these stories played in guiding him to issue the Emancipation Edict that freed the serfs in 1861.” – Literary Hub

Is fiction more like the covert violation of the liar, or like the overt violation of the ironical speaker? Unlike the liar, the fiction author doesn’t hide her untruthful intentions: they’re on the book’s cover, or announced by a library classification sticker. However, unlike in the case of irony, the fiction author’s words have their regular meaning. The apparent flouting doesn’t trigger the expected nonliteral reinterpretation of the author’s words in order to restore adherence to the maxims. – Aeon

Perhaps not surprisingly, more than half are books for children or young readers. No. 1 is “The Snowy Day,” Ezra Jack Keats’s picture book that is one of the first to depict an African-American boy, which has been checked out 485,583 times. Next is Dr. Seuss’s “The Cat in the Hat” (469,650). – The New York Times

If there’s any lesson that the decline of Christianity holds for the painful death of the English department, it’s that if you aspire to keep your faith alive even in a reduced, non-hegemonic form, you need more than attenuated belief and socially-useful applications. – The New York Times

The academic study of literature is no longer on the verge of field collapse. It’s in the midst of it. Preliminary data suggest that hiring is at an all-time low. Entire subfields (modernism, Victorian poetry) have essentially ceased to exist. In some years, top-tier departments are failing to place a single student in a tenure-track job. Aspirants to the field have almost no professorial prospects; practitioners, especially those who advise graduate students, must face the uneasy possibility that their professional function has evaporated. – Chronicle of Higher Education

Pronouns, along with conjunctions and prepositions, are generally considered a “closed class” – a group of words whose number rarely grows and whose meanings rarely change. So when pronouns take center stage, especially a new use of “they” that expands the closed class, linguists can’t help but get excited. – The Conversation

Languages do exist, but they are not necessarily the things we take them for. On the one hand, we each have an understanding of at least our mother tongue that allows us to produce sentences in it according to certain rules. I say “I kicked the ball” not “the ball kicked I.” That knowledge of rules in our brains is one part of the reality of a language. The other part is its existence as an autonomous system, a means of communication whose form is negotiated between speakers. It is not fixed, but changes as it is used in millions of separate interactions. – Paris Review

“I certainly did not know, for example, that the earliest recognised dust jacket belongs to a literary annual entitled Friendship’s Offering of 1829. Nor that e.e. cummings’s self-published No Thanks (1935) contains a dedication to the 14 different publishers who had rejected the manuscript: ‘NO THANKS TO Farrar & Rinehart, Simon & Schuster, Coward-McCann’, etc. Nor indeed that acknowledgements tend to be printed at the front of academic books, unlike works of fiction where the acknowledgements go at the end — this primary placement offering ‘a means to publish the author’s CV and boast of influential friends’.” – The Spectator

These studies miss a bigger point by implying that reading fiction is, at its best, a tidy cause-and-effect process. Enter intellectually weak and benighted, exit emotionally toned and trim, as if a novel were the psychological equivalent of kettlebells or a Peloton bike. Fiction’s strength, though, is that it delivers not order and clear direction, but mess and evocations of our unsteady state of being. – Washington Post