The verses, typically four lines long and metrical, are called daina. Thanks to an effort to transcribe them in the 19th and 20th centuries, there are now about a million of them collected at the national library in Riga. "Aficionados say this canon of folk poems is as significant as any body of classical literature. … For the past...
"When I wrote this book I could associate big-nosed Saleem with the elephant-trunked god Ganesh, the patron deity of literature, among other things, and that felt perfectly easy and natural even though Saleem was not a Hindu. All of India belonged to all of us, or so I deeply believed. And still believe, even though the rise of a...
Lawrence Venuti’s watershed book, The Translator’s Invisibility (1995), argued that the practice of ignoring the identity of the translator, to the point of being in denial that a work was even a translation at all, was part of an unhelpful hierarchical mindset that erroneously attributed absolute value to the original, ignoring the fact that each new translation was itself...
"Given these serious—and growing—problems, it’s not whataboutism to wonder why these old books get so much attention. Is it because attacking old books is easier than making the social and economic changes that would improve the actual lives of real children and their parents?" - The Nation
To paraphrase Shakespeare, "Work, work your thoughts, and therein see" ... anything from Paris to London, Lyme Regis to George Orwell's final destination. - The Guardian (UK)
There's truly, in the American literary canon, only one - Merry Levov, of Philip Roth's American Pastoral. What gives? And what do literary writers believe stuttering represents in the first place? - LitHub
Teresa Deevy wrote plays about young women coming to terms with - and pushing back on - the restrictions of life in Catholic Ireland. After Meuniere's disease caused her to become deaf, "She moved to London to study lip reading and while there became deeply immersed in theatre, deciding to become a playwright so that she 'would put the...
"A precise feeling of fondness accompanies the receipt of a letter from someone you care about. There are as many shades of this feeling as friends in the world. Yet I sometimes leave a letter unopened for days, not knowing if I am ready to read it. A friend I still write to confessed the same thing. I wonder what we think...
In January of 2017, a group of skilled, acrobatic robbers began a series of daring break-ins — climbing walls, breaking through skylights and barriers, lowering themselves dozens of feet with ropes, never setting off alarms — to steal shipments of rare books worth millions from storage facilities around London. Here's the story of how Scotland Yard, working with detectives...
Over the past few years, a series of stylometric analyses, employing both human brains and AI software, has found that the true identity of the famously pseudonymous and reclusive author is almost certainly that of writer Domenico Starnone. (The other prime candidate, identified by an investigative journalist in The New York Review of Books, is Starnone's wife, translator Anita...
Fans have been predicting the audiobook’s ascendance ever since it became possible to record books. But when exactly was that? The audiobook’s origins can be traced back further than most people realize. - Cabinet Magazine
The set of symbols known in the Rapa Nui language as rongorongo is the only indigenous system of writing known to have developed among Pacific Islanders. Only an elite minority of Rapa Nui people could ever read it, and they died out before mainland scholars could record their knowledge. What's more, only 26 examples of rongorongo have survived. Is...
"The Survive to Thrive grant program, created by Ingram Content Group chairman John Ingram, hopes to raise a total of $2 million by the end of May to support indie bookstores. The program will be administered by the Book Industry Charitable (Binc) Foundation. Initial donations include a $500,000 contribution from Ingram Charities and Ingram Content Group and significant gifts...
"No wonder most people would rather read Instapoems, or listen to a spoken-word performance, than engage with traditional poetry: the barriers to entry are much lower. People who love traditional poetry might be tempted to say that such writing isn’t poetry at all. But the battle over nomenclature is a losing one. If millions of people think Rupi Kaur...
