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WORDS

A Master Storyteller Approaches Her Death The Same Way She’s Approached Her Fiction

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

Working, Teaching, Writing, And Living In Three Languages

“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

The Black List Has an Amazing Track Record For Spotting Hollywood Writing Talent. Now It’s Expanding To Books

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

Federal Court Orders Arkansas Library To Stop Segregating Books

"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

Less Than Half Of American Adults Read a Book Last Year. And Yet A Billion Books Were Sold…

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

The Art And Craft Of The New York Post Headline

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

How Syntax Changes Meaning — The Context Of Adjacent Words

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

How British Words Invaded American English

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

How Do You Teach A Dying Language That Only Nine People Speak?

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

How Paraguayans Have Kept Their Indigenous Language Alive And Thriving

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

Students Entering Elite Colleges Don’t Know How To Read Books. Why?

It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to. - The Atlantic

Salman Rushdie’s “Knife” And Miranda July’s “All Fours” Among Titles Shortlisted For National Book Awards

"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

Syntax Makes (Almost) All The Difference

"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

Endangered Indigenous Languages Are Getting A Boost On Social Media

Never before have Indigenous nations and communities had so many tools for revitalizing their languages. - The Walrus

After Aggressive Book Bans, Soft-Bans

"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

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