Lore Segal, at 96, “still approaches everything in life and her writing in the same way: as something interesting, something to be dealt with as directly as one can manage.” - The New York Times
“My husband tells me, ‘You are a nicer person in Hindi than you are in English.’ I believe him. For everything that English has granted me, it has also been the language of competition and of getting ahead in life.” - LitHub
Fifty-four Academy Awards and 267 nominations. That’s the sort of concrete impact the Black List has had since launching in 2005 as Hollywood insiders’ go-to index of emerging screenwriters. It now hopes to do the same for publishing. - Wired
"In yet another major win for freedom to read advocates, a federal judge has ordered the Crawford County Public Library in Arkansas to stop segregating books deemed inappropriate by some local residents into special 'social sections,' and to return the books to general circulation." - Publishers Weekly
In 2022, fewer than half of adults reported reading a book in the past 12 months. Furthermore, only 38 percent reported reading fiction or short stories, a rate that has fallen a worrisome 17 percent over the past ten years. But digging into the data, I also found reasons for hope. - National Endowment for the Arts
An oral history: current and former Post staffers, along with people involved with the incidents in question, talk about how they come up with the headlines, reveal which ones were too much even for the Post, and flesh out the stories behind them. Yes, this includes "Headless Body in Topless Bar." - Esquire
Often, their authors are all too clearly estranged from the full resources of the English language: What should be putty in their hands is tough, fibrous, unworkable. Or they just can’t be bothered. They plunk down words one after the other like inopportune Tetris blocks, mismatched, ill fitting, and in the wrong order. - Hedgehog Review
The chattering classes – another useful Britishism – have a persistent desire for ostensibly clever ways to say stuff. They have borrowed from Wall Street, Silicon Valley, teen culture, African American vernacular, sports and hip-hop, and they increasingly borrow from Britain. - The Guardian
The dense Mukogodo Forest, one of the largest in east Africa, is the traditional home of the Yaaku. Originally hunter-gatherers, they looked after the 300 sq km forest, using it for hunting, rituals and to collect plants and honey. “If we lost the language, we have lost the culture, we have lost the forest." - The Guardian
Despite having been banned under the 35-year dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner, Guaraní is now, alongside Spanish, a fully official language of the country. Half of all public school classes in Paraguay are taught in Guaraní, and young people smoothly switch between it and Spanish even within a sentence. - The World
"The National Book Foundation has announced the finalists for the 2024 National Book Awards. The winners in each of the five categories — fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translated literature, and young people's literature — will be announced during an awards ceremony on November 20." - Publishers Weekly
"If a change of style is a change of subject, as Wallace Stevens averred, then a change of syntax is a change of meaning. Word order is, if not all, then nine tenths. I exaggerate, but I do so advisedly, as a corrective to the overemphasis on word choice." - The Hedgehog Review
"I think that is where the danger lies, because we can track the books that are being banned, but we can’t track books that are not being ordered.” - NBCNews
