Words

“We should look anew at 1920 not because centenaries have magical properties but because Fitzgerald’s remarkably sensitive inner ear helped him register, before almost anyone else, when America started losing its balance.” – The New York Review of Books

“It’s far and away the most ‘knowledgeable’ natural language generation program to date, and it has a range of potential uses in professions ranging from teaching to journalism to customer service. GPT-3 confirms what computer scientists have known for decades: Size matters.” – The Conversation

“How many times have I run up against these assertions? — in a chat between translators protesting because they are not listed in a publisher’s index of authors; or in the work of literary theorists, even poets. … In recent months, I have been dividing my working day between writing in the morning and translating in the afternoon. Maybe comparing the two activities would be a good way to test this writer–translator equation.” For Tim Parks, at least, they’re not at all the same. – The New York Review of Books

The great author and his home country, about which he wrote his most widely-known books, have not always gotten along since he fled the Communist regime in 1975 and didn’t return after it fell. (The latest flare-up happened earlier this year.) But now the 91-year-old Kundera has been awarded the Franz Kafka Prize, one of the Republic’s highest honors for writers, and he has “joyfully” accepted. – The Guardian

“A growing body of research suggests that we may be missing out by reading only with the voices inside our minds. The ancient art of reading aloud has a number of benefits for adults, from helping improve our memories and understand complex texts, to strengthening emotional bonds between people. And far from being a rare or bygone activity, it is still surprisingly common in modern life.” – BBC

Individual letters or parts of letters are printed on each face of a cube, so cubes can be placed in rows to form words, or cubes with letter fragments can be stacked to create letters at a large scale. They’re then placed on blank wayfinding infrastructure that has a small lip to hold them up. The resulting system is similar to a beautifully considered mega game of Scrabble, and can easily be adapted to meet the needs of the community it serves. – Fast Company

Hannah Lynch was “a neglected Irish writer, famous in her time,” but studying her also gives a window “into a robust international women’s culture at the fin-de-siècle that only recently has become the subject of critical revival, to which Irish writers, artists, journalists, and activists contributed.” – The Irish Times

How do you write a best seller? Long years of hard work and editing? Sheer lightning and writing skill? All of this, and also by getting published by Penguin Random House. – The New York Times

The $3.2 million cache came from a 2017 heist at a London warehouse, one of books so rare and with such niche interest that “one source, in Smithsonian, said that ‘a wealthy collector known as ‘The Astronomer’ may have hired the thieves to steal the books for him.'” Turns out it was an organized crime group in Romania. – LitHub

It’s a 1634 volume that a researcher into Adam Smith found in the archives of the Real Colegio de Escoceses, which in the 17th century was a seminary and “an important source of English literature for Spanish intellectuals.” – BBC

If you need to make plans for staying inside, safely, this winter, there’s a lot to choose from here – and very little overlap with the Booker lists. – The New York Times

There’s nothing like it – and it feels eerily prescient, too. “The Earthseed books are instructional in a way that other apocalypse fictions are not. They are not prepper fiction, though reading them will teach you a thing or two about go bags and the importance of posting a night watch. According to people who love the books, myself included, they offer something beyond practical preparations: a blueprint for adjusting to uncertainty.” – Slate

Realism is not a binary. It is at a minimum a spectrum. If you charted fictional realities on a football field, you’d find that work on the 45-yard “Realism” side is closer to the 45-yard “SFF” marker than it is to, say, Sally Rooney over the 8-yard line. But even a spectrum doesn’t accurately capture the vast ocean of fiction that takes our reality and heightens, stylizes, distorts, or warps it in different ways. – LitHub

“Nature, in the form of the predominant gloom that pervades our skies for much of the year, forces us inward — to a creative frontier that matches the geographic one. Thus, an obscure poet at a midweek reading on a winter’s eve, hoping for an audience beyond a few bookstore employees, will be happily shocked to find the room packed. People in Seattle love to come in out of the rain and tell stories, or to hear them.” – Crosscut

Each of the five jury members had to read through 162 books, getting a stack each month and then meeting in London to decide which ones advance to the next round. Then came the lockdown: no more trips to England (or anywhere else) and the books arriving as PDFs. At least, said juror Lemn Sissay, “there was nothing to do but read. There will never, ever, be a judging panel that has so much time to just focus on the books.” – The New York Times

“The Justice Department convened a grand jury and has subpoenaed publisher Simon & Schuster for documents as it investigates whether Bolton, [former National Security Adviser and] author of The Room Where it Happened, mishandled classified information.” – CNBC

The Booker list this year is dominated by books from American or U.S.-based authors, including “The Shadow King” by Ethiopia-born Maaza Mengiste, Diane Cook’s dystopian tale “The New Wilderness,” Avni Doshi’s India-set “Burnt Sugar” and Brandon Taylor’s campus novel “Real Life.” Only one British writer made the cut for the U.K.’s leading book prize. – Toronto Star (AP)

The laudable aim of encouraging brainy specialists to share their knowledge with the world at large has turned into a complete disaster. Why is the presence of an academic on a book prize judging panel, fronting a BBC Four arts documentary or even reviewing for a national newspaper generally such an embarrassment? – The Critic

Naturally, each character’s script is different, modeled by a calligrapher on surviving correspondence from England ca. 1800 and matched to each individual letter-writer in the novel by project curator Barbara Heller. (Elizabeth Bennet’s handwriting is copied from that of Austen herself.)
Here’s how Heller went about it. – Smithsonian Magazine

It’s not only Mantel: Anne Tyler and Colum McCann were also among the semifinalists who failed to advance. Of the six writers on the shortlist, four are women, four are nonwhite, and four, including one dual-national, are from the United States, a fact sure to incense those who still oppose the 2014 decision to open the Booker to any author writing in English and published in the UK. – The Guardian

Penned under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, Troubled Blood is Rowling’s fifth book to feature private investigator Cormoran Strike. An early review of the book by Telegraph writer Jake Kerridge described it as featuring a “transvestite serial killer,” which inspired readers’ anger and spawned the Twitter hashtag #RIPJKRowling — a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the author’s career. – CBC

English has some nouns and adjectives that apply strictly to one gender, but the languages descended from Latin are full of them, especially when referring to occupations. Here’s how some queer activists and linguists are trying to address that issue in Spanish (notably in Argentina), Portuguese, French, Italian, Catalan, and (trickiest of all) Romanian. – Global Voices

Americans in particular are small-talk artists. They have to be. This is a wild country. The most tenuous filaments of consensus and cooperation attach one person to the next. So the Have a nice days, the Hot enough for yous, the How ’bout those Metses—they serve a vital purpose. – The Atlantic

That, Doctorow explains, is because audiobooks sold through Audible must be bundled with copyright protection, or digital rights management (DRM) controls, whether authors or publishers want to include such restrictions or not. The DRM technology not only makes it harder to pirate audiobooks, but also restricts playback to devices and software authorized by Audible, which Amazon bought in 2008. – Fast Company

There’s the issue of not properly protecting workers in the pandemic. And in April, the Strand was approved for a PPP loan of $1–2 million to retain 212 jobs. Given that those jobs were not actually protected, workers in the store want to know where the money went. – The Baffler