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
Not to mention our own. "In horror, there is no ultimate triumph at the end. Even if the characters survive or defeat the monster, there’s no going back to the people they once were. That’s what grief feels like." - LitHub
One expert on challenged books: "Beloved is an extremely violent book, it’s absolutely true. But that is the point of the book. This mother ? She’s absolutely right—it’s extremely difficult to read. It gets stuck in your head." - Slate
No Modernism Without Lesbians is the title of Diana Souhami's most recent book - and the "hugely enjoyable" history of queer women like Stein, Toklas, Natalie Barney, and Sylvia Beach has won an LGBTQ-specific prize in Britain. - The Guardian (UK)
“There is no such thing as an individual work in literature.” The work is always part of a “system of literature,” in which the arts are interrelated. Indeed, “f a literary work is torn from the context of one literary system and moved to another, it will take on a different coloring. - LA Review of Books
“There’s this fantastic description of the gothic – that it is not a genre at all, but a virus that attaches itself to genres and infects texts, and also morphs through time and adapts as needed. I think horror perhaps could be seen as the same thing.” - The Guardian
Faced with uncertainty surrounding the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the ancients rushed to fill in gaps, in essence producing a biography of the poet who, it was assumed, must have lived at some point in the past. - Lapham's Quarterly
Spotify-like Kindle Unlimited subscriptions have made fiction into an “‘always on’ utility” that prioritizes “serial plenitude over singular encounters.” - The Baffler
The cheap, cheesy horror stories became so popular, especially among older children and teens, that they were arguably a bigger factor in spreading literacy than was the introduction of mandatory public education. - Atlas Obscura
The Nieman Journalism Lab asked its readers who had cancelled to tell them why, and hundreds did. Ideological or political bias was cited, but it was by no means the primary reason. - Nieman Lab
Craft, Matthew Salesses explains, is a series of expectations, and until those expectations are made explicit, they will enforce the status quo by concealing their traits as the marks of quality, of literariness. - The Nation
Having built a thriving multibillion-dollar web fiction industry at home, Chinese web novel platforms are increasingly looking to sell their stories — and the innovative way they mass-produce them — to literature lovers abroad. - Protocol
“Afterlives,” which explores the brutality of Germany’s colonial rule in East Africa, came out in Britain in September 2020 and was hailed as a masterpiece. But it failed to reach a wide readership and wasn’t even published in the United States. - The New York Times
It's not as simple as Urdu=Muslim and Hindi=Hindu. Not only did the two languages — which share all their grammar and most of their vocabulary — develop in tandem, but Hindi got many of its most basic features, including its name, via Urdu from Persian. - Scroll (India)
