“In 1853, after [George D.] Watt taught shorthand to Brigham Young, the Mormon leader commissioned the British clerk to create a 38-character ‘Deseret alphabet.’ The phonetic alphabet was meant to simplify the spelling of English words. Watt said … ‘An alphabet should contain just as many letters as there are simple-pure atoms of sound.’”
“If a child of mine had just been murdered I would find it hateful if somebody saw that as a means of making money.”
“One of the things I absolutely love about this genre is that, unlike Harry, where there was an overarching story, a beginning and an end, you’re talking about discrete stories. So while a detective lives, you can keep giving him cases.”
“In romance fiction, the lesbian werewolf with a thing for raw meat and three-ways underneath the full moon can get a date. The cross-dresser in 18th century England will find true love with a prince or a princess.”
“It is much more difficult to gather ideas of any complexity at all using Spritz than it is in ordinary reading. Complex ideas, like those routinely presented in philosophy or literary fiction, require a lot of rereading as you go. Also, when the sentence begins in a Spritz display, you can’t tell how long it’s going to be: a terrific drawback for comprehension.”
“For a country that boasts a population of approximately 320,000 people — that’s less than Belize, Brunei, and the Bahamas — Iceland is punching above its weight class.”
“The Great War had a horrid novelty, in that it was Europe’s first war in almost a century and the first mechanized war. It began in idealism and naivete, and sooner rather than later many people realized that the whole thing was an apparently endless muddle.”
“Despite the fact that it is not James Franco personally who makes being an artist difficult in today’s economy, it will forever be frustrating to see the space in august publications being taken up by reviews of his work that are well aware of the celebrity futility of reviews of his work.”
“Just remember that if you’re not one of those folks reading at least 13 books a year, then a $10 per month book service is probably not a top priority.”
“Girls about 15 or so are screaming, ‘Oh my God, oh my God,’ and circle around and of course there’s the blimming selfie craze now, so you have to stand there peering into mobile phones.”
“Less than a week into her role as North Carolina’s poet laureate, Valerie Macon, a self-published poet and state employee, resigned over questions about her literary credentials and qualifications.”
Author and journalism professor Ben Yagoda recommends such mainstays of the comedian’s art as the power of surprise and (yes) panic.
One of the central claims of “The Dream of the Great American Novel” is that novels are uniquely well suited to the task of representing what is quintessentially American because they are “carriers and definers of evolving ‘national imaginaries’”.
“The e-commerce giant is working on a subscription ebook service called Kindle Unlimited, which would offer unlimited ebook rentals for $9.99 a month. It’s a move that’s very much aligned with where both the tech and the publishing industry are headed.”
“If, then, when nations were forming, writers began to address their work to a national audience, wouldn’t it be logical that now, in a period of intense globalisation, they might think of their books from the start as being destined to travel beyond national borders? Hardly noticing the shift perhaps, the novelist begins to have a foreign audience in mind.”
“One critic of the appointment called Macon a “beginner” in poetry and noted that the title of “laureate” carries with it a signal that the poet has stature, statewide or nationwide, and the expectation that the person has a number of published works.”
“If, as Wordsworth said, poetry is human emotion recollected in tranquillity, what happens when verses are scrawled in sand on the floor of a shopping centre? When they are left unguarded, to be kicked and scuffed by customers wandering into Costa Coffee or New Look? We’ll find out this week.”
Her 2003 short story “My Father’s Head” opens “with the narrator’s attempts to remember what her father’s face looked like as she struggles to cope with his loss, and follows her as she finds the courage to remember.”
“While it’s heartening to know that Harry’s doing well in his career as an Auror and that Viktor Krum is still going strong as Bulgaria’s Seeker, it begs the question anew of when exactly it’s time for a creator to walk away from their creation—and whether they really can these days.”
“The benefits of writing by hand, and doing so from a young age, are fundamental: improved and sustained development in social skills, hand-eye coordination, long-term memory. And when one considers “fluency” in its literal sense, it makes sense that cursive especially can energize a more fluid and coherent process of thought.”
The author of Cloud Atlas and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet “turns to the ‘diabolical treble-strapped textual straitjacket’ of Twitter for the first time to tell a new short story, ‘The Right Sort’. Mitchell will unveil his tale, about a boy tripping on his mother’s Valium pills, in Twitter’s 140-character bursts for the next seven days.”
“This past October, French lawmakers decided it was time to show Amazon who’s boss. Frustrated by Amazon’s fast and cheap book-selling model, which poses a threat to France’s healthy ecosystem of indie bookstores, politicians banded together to approve a bill that prohibited Jeff Bezos’ company and other online retailers from shipping discounted books for free.” Far be it from Amazon to break the law …
“While it is possible to create a do-it-yourself e-book, even those who have self-published their work do not recommend going it alone.”
“Fewer people than ever before are crosswording. And just because crosswords are slowly losing their crotchety clues doesn’t mean that solver demographics have changed.”
“As poets with performance backgrounds rise through the ranks of poetry print culture, American poetry appears caught between a fear of performance and a celebration of it. As these page + stage poets become more prominent in universities, journals, and reading series, are they helping to renew conversations about performance as an aspect of making poems?”
“Figures from the Author’s Licensing and Collecting Society show the median income of a working author last year was only £11,000, lower than the amount needed to live on, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, and down 29% since the last survey in 2005.”
“The worst: crazies, meth-heads. Anyone can walk into our bookstore in the age of meth — it’s a constant worry.”
“When you highlight books on your Kindle, when you highlight a sentence that you particularly like, Amazon is keeping track of that – I’m not sure everyone knows that – and Amazon records what five sentences in a book are the most commonly highlighted.”
“Whether or not Jeff Bezos knew it – and any educated guess is that he did – Hachette was going to decline that proposal. And as Amazon knew well, the authors and agents themselves had no power to take it up on the deal.”
“The reason for the mass retraction is mind-blowing: A “peer review and citation ring” was apparently rigging the review process to get articles published. You’ve heard of prostitution rings, gambling rings and extortion rings. Now there’s a “peer review ring.”