Words

Journalist Lorraine Boissoneault looks into the effort — using classroom lessons, software, and the memory of one of five native speakers left — to revive and teach the Menominee language of Wisconsin. – The Believer

Karen Russell: “Today, we are witnessing the shotgun weddings of words into some strange unions, neologisms sped into existence by this virus (‘quarantunes,’ ‘quarantini’), epidemiological vocabulary hitched together by Twitter hashtags. It seems like there is a parallel language contagion occurring. ‘Self-isolation,’ ‘social distancing,’ ‘abundance of caution’ — pairs of words I’d never seen together in a sentence back in January have become ubiquitous.” – The New Yorker

The writer prompted the National Arts Center of Canada to launch virtual book tours for authors with new books out during the pandemic shutdown. Authors are “‘really pinched,’ Atwood said in an interview the day before she launched the authors’ series. ‘People are scrambling around, improvising and trying to get the word out there.'” – The New York Times

Why not? It’s National Poetry Month, after all, and poems can refocus the mind, bringing it gently back to focus. You might even try memorizing a poem or two. – The Atlantic

Sebastian Barry goes for the real classics: “It seems uncanny that there is a radiant book for these times, although it was written 2,000 years ago.” – The Guardian (UK)

Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven was much recommended in the coronavirus’ early days – but even she thought people shouldn’t be reading it right now. Her new novel is about the 2008 crash and a Bernie Madoff-like character. Why? “It’s a period in recent history that I remember so vividly. It was such an unsettling, chaotic time.” – The Guardian (UK)

The author is on her 111th novel – she long ago stopped buying her signature chunky silver rings for each book – and this one might be her most personal. “Wilson is the fairy goth-mother of children’s fiction credited with daring to introduce such non-cheery subjects as depression and divorce into her children’s bedrooms.” – The Guardian (UK)

Sure, Shakespeare and the Bible outsell Agatha Christie, but otherwise, she’s the tops. “Agatha Christie’s novels have sold more than one billion copies in the English language and another billion internationally.” Thirty percent of USians who like to read started their mystery reading with an Agatha Christie book. And then there’s Mousetrap. – Literary Hub

Alvarez, the author of In the Time of the Butterflies and the new Afterlife, isn’t trying to be facetious or to downplay the importance of health care workers or grocery clerks. But, quoting Robert Frost, she adds, “I use [literature] in the broad sense. I don’t mean just written stories. I mean oral stories. I mean music. I mean dance. All these things people are seeking solace in. Here are your waters and your watering place. Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.” – NPR

Here’s what’s going on with some bookstores in Los Angeles. The Ripped Bodice in Culver City, which has a big Twitter following, offered a “care package” deal. Co-owner Leah Koch: “‘Those have been so popular. We put them up before we closed to foot traffic. Within 48 hours, we had 230 orders,’ Koch says, adding that the store now has a waitlist for the care package service and, as of this writing, there were 700 people on the waitlist.” Other bookstores? It’s not great news. – The Hollywood Reporter

I spoke to several industry professionals; almost all were reluctant to play Monday morning quarterback without the promise of anonymity—if you’re making a book deal in secret, perhaps it’s worth interrogating why. – The New Republic

Comics are largely sold through the direct market, moving from publisher to distributor to specialty comics retailers, as opposed to digital distribution or the newstands of yesteryear. But last month, Diamond Comics Distributors—the monopoly that supplies monthly comics to retailers in the United States and Britain—announced that it was refusing to accept new product from comics’ largest publishers, including Marvel, DC, Image, and Boom Studios. – The Daily Beast

An April Fool’s story that’s actually true: back during the 1978 newspaper strike in New York City, a group of writers and editors that included some now-illustrious names — George Plimpton, Nora Ephron, Carl Bernstein, Terry Southern, Frances FitzGerald — put together a parody newspaper and got it onto newsstands. Here’s the first-ever oral history of this proto-Onion from some of the folks involved. – The New York Times

Here’s a brief history, going from a five-by-five palindrome from ancient Rome to Victorian double acrostics to four different kinds of riddle (including the anti-riddle). – The Paris Review

It’s certainly true that people have been reading Shakespeare’s plays for almost as long as they have been watching them. Within two or three years of his first, collaborative efforts on the London stage, Shakespeare’s first play in print was the gory tragedy Titus Andronicus (1594). Only one copy of this edition exists, now in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC. That scarcity itself tells us something about reading: playbooks were small, consumable pamphlets often read into oblivion, not literary trophies to be venerated. – The Guardian

In a 2016 study, the median small business had enough cash to last just 27 days, while a 2018 survey found that 21 percent would fail after a month without cash flow. Bookstores run on even slimmer margins than the typical mom-and-pop shop—but the ones that have survived in the Amazon era have made it for a reason. – Slate

“The imprint at Penguin Random House [is] responsible for publishing some of history’s most canonical authors, from Homer and Marcus Aurelius to James Joyce and George Eliot. Elda Rotor, who has helmed the imprint for 14 years, said the shift to diversify the imprint’s vast catalog has been intentional.” – The New York Times

When libraries closed their doors abruptly, they immediately opened their digital communications, collaborations, and creative activity to reach their public in ways as novel as the virus that forced them into it. You can be sure that this is just the beginning. Today libraries are already acting and improvising. Later, they’ll be figuring out what the experience means to their future operations and their role in American communities. – The Atlantic

The description of a house can vividly reveal the experience of childhood or the story of a relationship: “How a house is lived in can tell you everything you need to know about people, whether it’s the choice of wallpaper, the mess in the kitchen, the silence or shouting over meals, doors left open or closed, a fire burning in the hearth”. – The Guardian

Even as government officials seemed a bit cavalier about it all – talking about herd immunity, for instance – people sensed that a shutdown was coming. “Sales of fiction rose by a third, while children’s education went up 234% to the third highest level on record. Puzzle books, handicrafts and true crime also saw sharp rises.” – BBC

Carmen Esposito’s Save Yourself was meant to be released on a book tour that saw the comedian and podcaster performing in cities across the country. But then, COVID-19. In the book, she writes, “Humans are scared out of our minds and want to be saved. We want to know why we are here, what we are supposed to do, and how to protect ourselves.” – NPR

That’s right, Camus’ The Plague is leading a wave of “pestilence fiction.” Get this: “The British publisher of The Plague, Penguin Classics, says it is struggling to keep up with orders. ‘We’ve gone from shipping quantities in the low hundreds every month to the mid-thousands.'” – The Guardian (UK)

Some of the still laid-off Powell’s staff are unhappy with the way the company has handled the store closures and layoffs, but for others, the present is a little rosier. CEO Emily Powell wrote on Friday in a memo on the website, “Thanks to your orders on Powells.com, we now have over 100 folks working at Powell’s again – all full time with benefits.” – The Oregonian

Remember last fall and winter? Well, there were plans: “Months ago, in what now feels like another era, publishers planning their 2020 schedules hoped to avoid releasing books in the fall, typically the industry’s biggest season. Editors and writers worried that new releases would be lost in the deluge of political news leading up to the presidential election, so publishers jammed some of their biggest titles into the spring.” – The New York Times

Jill Lepore: “The literature of contagion is vile. A plague is like a lobotomy. It cuts away the higher realms, the loftiest capacities of humanity, and leaves only the animal. “Farewell to the giant powers of man,” Mary Shelley wrote in “The Last Man,” in 1826, after a disease has ravaged the world. “Farewell to the arts,—to eloquence.” Every story of epidemic is a story of illiteracy, language made powerless, man made brute. But, then, the existence of books, no matter how grim the tale, is itself a sign, evidence that humanity endures, in the very contagion of reading.” – The New Yorker

“It is the middle of a plague — ‘a pestilence so great and universal, that already it has been three months since it started, and many have died and many more continue to die.’ This does little to stop a group of scholars who have sealed themselves off from the world in a Mexico City convent, where they toil on a series of volumes devoted to indigenous knowledge.” Carolina Miranda recounts the story of the Historia General de las cosas de la Nueva España, a 12-volume manuscript from 1576 now known as the Florentine Codex. – Los Angeles Times