The librarian is a seeker and keeper of truth, and that makes her a dangerous figure in the eyes of those who fear the fullest, most comprehensive, and most uncomfortable truths emerging. - LitHub
“How to End a Story: Collected Diaries by Helen Garner charts the Australian writer's life from her early career in bohemian Melbourne to raising her daughter in the 1970s and her disintegrating marriage in the 1990s.” The jury’s vote was unanimous, with one judge calling it “a remarkable, addictive book.” - BBC (Yahoo!)
“Laurent Mauvignier Tuesday won France's top literary award, the Goncourt, for his family saga spanning the 20th century and recounting the story of his grandmother accused of collaborating during World War II. Just one round of voting sufficed for the jury to select La Maison Vide.” - AFP (Yahoo!)
Editor Roger Angell called the three stories “interesting and wholly original” but said “they seem to work in very different ways on different readers.” At least he allowed that “I’m not at all sure that we aren’t making a mistake.” That must have stung Sexton, always unsure of herself when writing prose. - Literary Hub
Let this be painfully clear: The future will only remember what is preserved today, and the choice is between standing by as stories are diluted or destroyed—or fighting for the record, for the archive, and for the truth with steady, everyday work that anyone can participate in. - Common Dreams
Orlean allows that if there’s anything anyone should be jealous of, it’s that she had been encouraged to pursue ideas most magazine editors would dismiss as small. - New York Magazine
The retailer is in the process of opening 15 new outlets this year, which will keep the total number of outlets at over 220 spread across 32 states. - Publishers Weekly
“Writing can terrify us, confuse us, devastate us. Good writing means that you’re engaging with practices that will force you to lean into things that make you uncomfortable. Work that’s doing its job is inevitably hard.” - LitHub
For instance: “Turkish author Sabahattin Ali’s 1943 novel Madonna in a Fur Coat, first published by Penguin in 2016, has rocketed this year, selling almost 30,000 copies in the UK and outstripping even Pride and Prejudice. It’s another anguished story of frustrated love.” - The Guardian (UK)
While some in the literary world are snobs, one author says she considers the best of historical fiction “a lens forged from the experience of the past, through which we may view the concerns of the present with renewed clarity.” - Irish Times
“Lauriane Nicol threw herself wholeheartedly into the creation of the Prix Gouincourt (gouine is a slang term for lesbian), an ironic hat tip to France's most celebrated literary award, the Prix Goncourt.” - Le Monde (Archive Today)
The actor, who is also a talented and award-winning screenwriter, told Stephen Colbert, “I end up just going, ‘I don’t need you to fucking rewrite what I’ve just written! Will you fuck off? Just fuck off! I’m so annoyed.’” - The Guardian (UK)
For most of human history, culture was exclusively oral. Knowledge was transmitted by speech, and what could be transmitted was what could be remembered. Oral culture was “aggregative rather than analytic”—full of redundancy, traditionalist in disposition, and embedded in the “human lifeworld,” rather than allowing abstract thought. - The Baffler
If we consider literacy not as the ability to parse simple sentences but as the capacity to comprehend and enjoy complex texts, and ultimately as a sensibility that approaches the world itself as a text that requires interpretation, it’s obvious we live in an unprecedented decline of what neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf calls “deep literacy.” - The Baffler
