The novel has been misinterpreted for a long time: just after it was published, Fitzgerald complained to Edmund Wilson that "of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one had the slightest idea what the book was about." And that's continued in the popular mind for nearly a century. (The idea of a Gatsby-themed party, after all, seems...
"That semicolons, unlike most other punctuation marks, are fully optional and relatively unusual lends them power; when you use one, you are doing something purposefully, by choice, at a time when motivations are vague and intentions often denied. And there are very few opportunities in life to have it both ways; semicolons are the rare instance in which you...
Alisher Navoiy was born in 1441 in Herat, now in Afghanistan but historically a Persianate city. He wrote in Arabic, Persian, and Chagatai, the Turkic literary language used all over Central Asia in the Middle Ages and considered the ancestor of modern literary Uzbek. In one of his most famous treatises, he compared Persian (with a centuries-old literary tradition...
Their embrace of internet sales appears to have paid off, allowing them to meet surging demand spurred by the Black Lives Matter movement and the holiday shopping season, cementing the loyalty of longtime customers while reaching new ones, and succeeding in taking back dollars that were previously lost to online competitors. - Publishers Weekly
"In the shouty Valhalla of pointlessly destructive literary feuds, a place of honor must go to the verbal duel between the poets Heinrich Heine and August von Platen, which amused and disgusted the German literary world in 1829. Two outsiders — a Jew and a homosexual — resorted to crude stereotypes as they attempted to eject each other from...
Kate Hartson, a fit 67-year-old who once ran a small press specializing in dogs, had all the trappings of a liberal book editor, including an apartment on the Upper East Side and a place in Hampton Bays. But she also seemed to be that rarest of figures in New York media: a true believer in Donald J. Trump, people...
At least in the 18th century. "Wherever they were writing, these women had dared to move out of the conventional female role of service and self-sacrifice to pursue their own needs and drives. Dogged by financial insecurity, ill health, and bad eyesight as a number of them were, it took a special kind of courage to defy the stifling...
One youth poet laureate: "She was given the platform to really pull people in and witness the magic of it, and I think that once you get that, you're going to be hooked." - BBC
Some furloughed workers says they can't make rent, can't buy food, can't make it in general, at 80 percent of their pay - and of course, that means the workers weren't being paid much before the virus hit. From the workers' petition: "It is not our intention to damage or attack our company. We are dedicated to our jobs...
The Wallace Collection "is in internal consultation" about closing the library and archive that was left to the country in 1897. Is that even legal? Will anyone notice during the pandemic? (More than 10,000 people certainly have noticed.) - The Guardian (UK)
Gorman: "I love Black poets. I love that as a Black girl, I get to participate in that legacy. So that’s Yusef Komunyakaa, Sonia Sanchez, Tracy K. Smith, Phillis Wheatley. And then I look to artists who aren’t just poets. While I was writing the Inaugural poem, I was reading a lot of Frederick Douglass, a lot of Winston Churchill,...
Booksellers often distrusted Voltaire, because by modifying his texts and multiplying the editions, he alienated their customers. No one wanted to pay good money for a slightly new version of a book that one had already bought. And some booksellers had become disenchanted with his endless variations on the same themes. - Lapham's Quarterly
There are the endless literary takes. There are Anthony Horowitz’s sequels, or Andrew Lane’s tales of a teenage Holmes. Star basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has written novels about Holmes’s older brother Mycroft; Nancy Springer wrote the Enola Holmes books, giving Holmes and Mycroft a younger sibling. James Lovegrove has combined the worlds of Holmes and HP Lovecraft in the...
Back in 2009, the NFL itself was wondering about that very question. So they asked Ben Zimmer, America's most famous lexicographer, to look into it. Turns out that "hut" in particular is very practical, and it has a pedigree that seems obvious once you think about it. - Mental Floss
