ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

WORDS

All The Books That Won Big Prizes This Year

From the Pulitzer to the Booker, the Nebula to the Edgar, here are the winners of the biggest book prizes of 2021. - Bookmarks

Why Our Ideological Fights Descend Into Fights About What Words Mean

The well-rehearsed rhetorical drama over this kind of conceptual terminology is only one of the ways in which arguments over definitions and usage have risen to prominence and in some cases become almost synonymous with the desire for social change in recent years. - The Point

Conservatives Trying To Ban Certain Books From Schools Forget About The Streisand Effect

In Virginia, Texas, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere, whether the topic is race, sexuality, history, or something else, grownups trying to keep particular books from teens end up reminding the teens that those books exist and can be obtained from booksellers. - The Guardian

I Think, Therefore I Have Language

So how does language and thought relate, then? And what is “thought”, anyway? Perhaps one way of answering both questions is to determine whether any of the representations language provides – syntactic, phonological, semantic, etc. – are suitable for the “fixation of belief.” - 3 Quarks Daily

Schadenfreude For The Holidays: The Meanest Book Reviews Of 2021

"Among the titles being cast into the maw of the volcano this year: Blake Bailey's oozing hagiography of Philip Roth, Mitch Albom's latest cavity-inducing parable, Andrew Sullivan's overfull toilet of essays" (fed to the merciless Dale Peck) "and Malcolm Gladwell's smug apologia for American butchery." - Book Marks

Was Don Quixote (And Was Cervantes) Nostalgic For Muslim Spain?

"Cervantes knew that after the terrible, dogmatic reality in which he lived, there would be imagination. But" — having spent years in Algiers — "the power, beauty, humor, and eloquence of Islamic Spain wasn't something he had to imagine." - Public Books

Confessions Of A Crossword Puzzle Constructor

What makes for a good word, in the eyes of a crossword-puzzle constructor? The language of aesthetic judgment is gustatory—one has good taste or feels something in one’s gut—but crosswords are meant to transcend physical sensations. - The New Yorker

How Do You Reconcile Being A Writer With Having A Career?

There is a contradiction here of both scorning a system that’s shallow and rigged, and also feeling bitter about not being able to succeed within such a system in order to get our remuneration. - The Point

The Most Adapted Of All Modern Ghost Stories (Excepting “A Christmas Carol”)

Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (1898) has inspired many a movie and television adaptation as well as a major opera. Adam Scovell looks at the novella's enduring appeal for adapters. - Literary Hub

Do Great Books Courses Make Us Better?

John McWhorter: "To simply know that the kinds of questions Rousseau stimulates are, indeed, questions makes you a better person in the sheer sense of understanding the complexity of the real world, something that escapes ideologues of all kinds." - The New York Times

A Book At Christmas Can Change The Entire Course Of A Life

Choose wisely. - The Guardian (UK)

Reading In Translation

"Well, friends, another grim and grueling plague year is drawing to a close, and that can mean only one thing." Reading - but why not the best reviewed books in translation of 2021? Why not, for instance, Jhumpa Lahiri translating herself? - LitHub

How To Write A Novel In A Month

Don't start writing the sex scenes just before your in-laws arrive, for one. - The Guardian (UK)

Randall Kenan Should Take His Rightful Place Beside Gabriel Garcia Marquez In The Canon Of Postmodernity

"Whether owing to regional or racial bias, or to the author’s deeply ingrained humility and privacy, Kenan has not taken his rightful place in the postmodern canon, though his fictional town of Tims Creek proved as generative as any Macondo or Yoknapatawpha." - The New York Times

The Joys Of The Baghdad Book Fair

"Patrons savor the chance to browse aisles of paperbacks and hardcovers stacked on tables in pavilions from different countries. ... To revel in what to many Iraqis is the true, enduring character of Baghdad." - The New York Times

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