ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

WORDS

Authors’ Guild Doubles Down On Support Of DOJ In Suit Against Merger

Boo from the Guild to the proposed Penguin Random House takeover of Simon & Schuster: "Consolidation doesn’t just stifle competition, it also makes acquisition editors less willing to take risks," the Guild says. And that's bad for consumers, er, readers. - Los Angeles Times

The Work It Takes To Create A Compelling Memoir

Just ask Laura Davis: "After many failed attempts at story architecture, with the help of several editors, my brilliant coach ... and 127 early readers, I ended up with a braided structure, moving the reader through time, keeping them guessing." - Los Angeles Review of Books

A Parent Wants To Criminally Prosecute Librarians

During a tsunami of deeply virulent homophobic, racist protests against books, a parent in Kitsap County, Washington, has asked to prosecute librarians for having the graphic novel Gender Queer: A Memoir on high school shelves. - LitHub

Ian Fleming Estate Authorizes New 007 Series

Kim Sherwood has struck a deal with HarperCollins to write three contemporary thrillers set in the world of James Bond but where the original 007 is missing, presumed captured or even killed. - The Guardian

This Nigerian Nobel Laureate’s Got A New Book, 50 Years After The Previous One

Wole Soyinka has received the Nobel Prize in Literature. He has written more than two dozen plays, a vast amount of poetry, several memoirs, essays, and short stories, and just two novels. His third novel is out now, nearly five decades after the last one. - The New Yorker

“The Internet At Its Utopian Best”: In Praise Of The Public Domain Review

"'A frictionless world' in which evidence of the imagination floats around in the empyrean 'without cost, without registration, and without restrictive conditions on their use, … a Borgesian Library of Babel, the Review is a labyrinth to get lost in." - The Times Literary Supplement (UK)

Why “Mistakes” In Language Are Actually Progress

Someone in my line of work hears around him a linguistic feast, where many just hear the English language going to the dogs. - The New York Times

The Impossibility Of Translating

To put it less politely, translation is a bitch. - Granta

What’s The Secret Of Poetry’s Power? It’s The Rhythm, Baby

"Poems meet the raw needs of our most vulnerable inner selves in a disarmingly primal way, using a simple tool no other sort of language mobilises in quite the same manner: predictable, physical, rhythmical repetition. Poetry chants and incants; it excites and lulls." - Psyche

For The First Time, A Black African Author Wins France’s Top Book Award

Mohamed Mbougar Sarr of Senegal has won the Prix Goncourt for La plus secrète mémoire des hommes (The Most Secret Memory of Men), which the magazine L'Express called "the revelation of the literary year … shining proof of the vitality and universality of the French language." - The Guardian

This Year’s Booker Prize Winner:

Booker judges pronounced Damon Galgut the winner, praising his novel for its “unusual narrative style that balances Faulknerian exuberance with Nabokovian precision, pushes boundaries, and is a testament to the flourishing of the novel in the 21st century.” - The New York Times

Middle East’s Leading English-Language Newspaper Shuts Down

The Daily Star was founded in Beirut in 1952 and relaunched in 1996, after Lebanon's 1975-90 civil war. Having struggled financially for years, it published its last print edition in February 2020 and is ending online operations amid Lebanon's worst economic crisis since independence. - AP

Justice Department Seeks To Block Giant Publishing Merger

Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement, “If the world’s largest book publisher is permitted to acquire one of its biggest rivals, it will have unprecedented control over this important industry. - Deadline

The Old Soviet Novel That Was The Prototype For Orwell’s “1984”

Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, published 100 years ago, set 1,000 years in the future in a technologically controlled superstate, was the first novel ever banned in the Soviet Union. - The New York Times

The Word Of The Year 2021 Is Vax

So says Oxford Languages, publisher of The Oxford English Dictionary. "'All these other vaccine words increased, but nothing like vax,' said Fiona McPherson, a senior editor for new words. ... 'It’s a short, punchy, attention-grabbing word.'" - The New York Times

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