Words

 It must be that people don’t remember real parties well enough to re-create them with any accuracy. There’s too much missing information. Fictive parties evoke this sense of impaired time by impairing the narrative, with non sequitur, snippets of nonsense conversation, and continuity errors. It’s often suddenly 2 AM. Whole hours may go by in the space of a sentence, as in A Handful of Dust: “They drank a lot.” Those four words are one paragraph, and contain so much. – Paris Review

The Spanish Royal Academy (RAE), the institution in charge of defending and defining the Spanish language, had been reeling under cuts for more than a decade. Then it got a new director – and he never stopped saying the RAE was of concern to the country. That worked, to the tune of 5 million Euros. Now, “the RAE will be in charge of at least 20 projects of exceptional interest, including the elaboration of different dictionaries, grammar or, now, its work of ensuring the correct use of language in the digital era.” – El País

And in specific, stop harassing Asian Americans authors. Listen to author R.O. Kwon (The Incendiaries) discuss her experiences at literary events: “Aside from the colorist comments about my skin, some of these words — adorable, cute, silky, shiny — could be taken, incorrectly, as compliments. I acknowledge that there’s luck, and privilege, in inhabiting a body that others might find appealing. But when I’m at these events, I am at work. I am talking about my profession, not about my hair or skin or any perceived cuteness.” – The New York Times

Writers focusing on the time period itself, and its long aftermath, have a lot of conflicting desires for their books. “What comes across in all of the writing on the Atlantic slave trade is the sustained tension between a determination to close the chapter on slavery and the desperate fear of forgetting.” – The Guardian (UK)

Mitchell Kaplan founded Books & Books in 1982, a time when Miami was seen as a place of drug running, diet culture, and political unrest – and certainly not literary culture. But, well, “thirty-seven years, an international book fair and eight additional locations later, Kaplan is celebrated as the man who turned Miami into a book town, and one of the foremost literary centers in the world.” – The New York Times

Charlotte Perkins Gilman has become a go-to feminist author with her clear, understandable, and terrifying short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” forgotten after her death but rediscovered in the 1970s. But she wrote a lot of nonfiction as well. In that writing, “she accused non-white immigrants of ‘diluting’ the racial purity of America and advocated for a government-run, slavery-adjacent system of forced labor, which she called ‘enlistment,’ for black Americans.” – LitHub

What’s the Whiting Award – and who are these people? (It’s a $50,000 award for early-career writers, so no surprise you don’t know most of them yet.) – NPR

And writing about trauma doesn’t bestow some kind of catharsis on authors, or so says T. Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls. “My love for magic, still, is all about mechanics. Construction. Physics. My knowledge of how tricks are done does not deaden the awe and admiration I feel—it deepens it. Sometimes I work hard for that knowledge.” – LitHub

“Chaucer was able to transform English poetry the way he did precisely because of his internationalism, not his nationalism. Like all educated men of his day, he was multilingual. He devoured late-antique philosophy, Latin translations of Arabic scientific treatises, and French love poems. His unusually good knowledge of Italian – and his travels to Italy – allowed him to access the latest poetry of Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch. Indeed, Chaucer’s very fascination with vernacularity was a European phenomenon: Dante and Boccaccio’s championing of Tuscan vernacular inspired Chaucer to see what he could do with his own.” – Aeon

Says a statement from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, “In Find Me, Aciman shows us Elio’s father Samuel, now divorced, on a trip from Florence to Rome to visit Elio, who has become a gifted classical pianist. A chance encounter on the train leads to a relationship that changes Sami’s life definitively. Elio soon moves to Paris where he too has a consequential affair, while Oliver, now a professor in northern New England with sons who are nearly grown, suddenly finds himself contemplating a return visit to Europe.” – Vulture

“The apocalypse can facilitate a different kind of social world,” says scholar Caroline Edwards. “That might seem horrifying to the protagonists, but the writer is posing a serious question: might this new world be better?” Sumit Paul-Choudhury digs into this idea. – BBC

For people with modest bank accounts, a tour of the fair amounts to a trip to an exhibit or museum, with dealers happily telling the often fascinating stories behind their wares, even if a potential sale is nowhere in sight. The 59th edition of the fair took place March 7 to 10 at the Park Avenue Armory. – The New York Times

Francis Spufford, who won a Costa Book Award and an Ondaatje Prize for his 2016 book Golden Hill, has spent 3½ years working on a Narnia prequel he’s titled The Stone Table. “After finishing the novel, Spufford made a ‘tentative’ approach to ask the Lewis estate if they might agree to publication, but did not receive a reply. Eventually he printed up 75 copies and started giving them to friends” — who are praising it to the skies. – The Guardian

Across the world, language revitalization movements are attempting to reverse language loss. While levels of institutional support and overall strategies differ, the goal is the same. Language is more than a way to communicate basic information, it expresses culture and identity: it’s used to explain the surrounding world, to sing songs, to worship, and to pass on stories. Languages are a link that bond people in a community to each another and to their shared past. – The Outline

Catherine Brown: “At the risk of taking too-seriously an award of which the keynote is not seriousness, there are several problems involved in this that are worth considering. One is the implicit hypocrisy that the award has brought great publicity to its parent magazine because of the very fact – which the award ostensibly disparages – that sex sells.” – IAI News

Go read the entire (short) story that the booksternet (Liternet?) is flipping out about. – Twitter

Marlon James knew he was gay from a young age, but he believed he shouldn’t be, so he underwent an exorcism through his church. “He describes the exorcism process as ‘a kind of mental control’: ‘Back then I thought they were just driving out demons,’ he recalls. James said he was sick multiple times during the ‘cure’: ‘Then one day it hit me: ‘What if I got rid of the church?’ And that worked smashingly.'” – The Observer (UK)

To be real, many book-lovers can’t afford the books, or even the ephemera, at the Antiquarian Book Fair. But hey, information wants to be free, right? That seems to be true at the fair, with “dealers happily telling the often fascinating stories behind their wares, even if a potential sale is nowhere in sight.” – The New York Times

Yes, even in 2019, a magazine article – in this case, in Wired – can make a difference. For instance, “Kerry Rivera’s Healing the Symptoms Known As Autism, which advocates dosing autistic children with a bleach-like substance, chlorine dioxide, was no longer available from the online giant.” – The Guardian (UK)

Why is true crime so hot right now? Ask an agent: “I suspect the true-crime podcast thing is driving the current interest.” – The Guardian (UK)

With well over half a million books in Arabic and more than one million antique maps, documents, and other materials (including a 9th-century Quran), the library was one of the most important in the Middle East — until ISIS began its destruction while it occupied the city (2014-17). Now the NGO Book Aid International and a project called the Mosul Book Bridge are gradually undoing the damage. – Publishing Perspectives

“Criticism” in The New York Times Book Review tends to look “positive,” by academic standards, not because it always says the book is good but because it offers market advice as to whether you should buy it, whether you will like it, without asking much about the market itself or about what it would mean about you or about the world if you did like it. – Chronicle of Higher Education