Words

It’s called a “slow fire,” this continuous acidification and subsequent embrittlement of paper that was created with the seeds of its own ruin in its very fibers. In a 1987 documentary on the subject, the deputy Librarian of Congress William Welsh takes an embrittled, acid-burned book and begins tearing pages out by the handful, crumbling them into shards with an ease reminiscent of stepping on a dried-up insect carcass. – Literary Hub

The recounting of a life in the form of a letter may go all the way back to Benjamin Franklin, but it’s currently seeing a revival, kicked off by Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me and carried by major works by Imani Perry, Terese Marie Mailhot, Ocean Vuong, and others. “The new epistolary memoirs, however,” writes Parul Sehgal, “are less interested in stitching a life into a tidy narrative shroud than in ripping it from its seams.” – The New York Times

Brett Stephens: “We live in an age that is losing the capacity to distinguish art from ideology and artists from politics. “I’m standing at my garden gate and there are 50 journalists,” Handke complained on Tuesday, “and all of them just ask me questions like you do, and from not a single person who comes to me I hear they have read any of my works or know what I have written.” He has a point. He didn’t win a Nobel Peace Prize or some other humanitarian award. His art deserves to be judged, or condemned, on its artistic merits alone.” – The New York Times

Beginning Nov. 1, Macmillan Publishers, one of the so-called Big Five publishing companies in North America, will only allow libraries to purchase one copy of each new e-book for the first eight weeks after it has been released. Librarians who say the decision is unfair to readers are campaigning against it. – CBC

“The index of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language mentions regional differences in 95 places. … In reality, America has often been the conservative one, and Britain the innovator. When British speakers borrow American habits, they are sometimes unwittingly readopting an older version of their language.” (One surprising example: the subjunctive.) – The Economist

“According to Bowker’s annual survey of the self-publishing market … the total number of print and e-books that were self-published in 2018 was 1.68 million, up from 1.19 million in 2017. [This figure] does not include self-published e-books by Amazon’s Kindle division, … [which is the] largest publisher of self-published e-books.” – Publishers Weekly

Dylan Howard, who remains a top executive at the Enquirer’s parent company, American Media Inc., has hired several high-powered law firms on three continents, including the Sydney-based McLachlan Thorpe Partners, to suppress Farrow’s book, which chronicles the extraordinary lengths the Australian tabloid muckraker had gone to help his friend, criminally charged alleged serial rapist Harvey Weinstein. – The Daily Beast

“Andrew Davies’ TV adaptation of Sanditon, which aired on Sunday, ended with Charlotte and Sidney bidding each other a tearful farewell – in love, but not together. … The ending has enraged and upset viewers, but most of all, I think, surprised them. This is Austen, and we know what we’re entitled to: there’s even a book about it, for goodness’ sake – The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After.” – The Guardian

The danger is that the Booker effect that propelled last year’s “difficult” winner, the brilliant Milkman, to a wider readership will be dissipated. Perhaps it’s best understood as a reminder of how impossible it is, in the end, for the subjective process of weighing one novel against another to come to an objective conclusion. – The Guardian

This week investigators accused professor Dirk Obbink, one of the most celebrated classics professors in the world, a Nebraska native and MacArthur “genius grant” recipient who had long directed — and allegedly looted — Oxford’s Oxyrhynchus Papyri Project, a collection of centuries-old literature recovered from an ancient Egyptian garbage dump in 1896. – Washington Post

Yes, one of them is Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments; the other is Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other. Over more than five hours of debate, the judges were told repeatedly that splitting the prize was not permitted, so the panel unanimously made the decision “to flout the rules.” – The Guardian

Once the ultimate arbiter of great literature, it has struggled to remain relevant at a time of cultural fragmentation. It could not continue on its historical course—awarding unknown European poets who would fail to stir excitement in the media (and social media)—and remain relevant. – The New Republic

Punctuation – and especially semicolon use – is more art than science, in other words. – Times Literary Supplement

Originally the James Tiptree Jr. Literary Award was meant to give encouragement to writers with new or creative thinking about gender, but the award’s focus has changed – and now the award name is changing too. “We entered into this discussion as a conversation about how to interpret what happened at the end of Alice and Huntington Sheldon’s lives. … But the responses to our post made us realize that this was in fact a conversation about whose lives and voices we value. And that’s a matter about which there should be no ambiguity.” – Tiptree Award

If you’re angry and you want to know what to read, remember, books can help you channel it into something less general and more focused. – The Rumpus

Margaret Atwood’s new book is running at 2/1, while Ducks, Newburyport is at 6/1, and so forth for the other short-listed books. Put your money where you see fit. – The Observer (UK)

And that’s not even taking into account the genocide apologist stance of the man who won. This two-year award “decision fails to demonstrate the widened perspective that Olsson promised. Taking him at his word, it invites questions about how diligent their search can have been, how knowledgeable the jury, and indeed how global a literary prize the Nobel can claim to be.” – The Guardian (UK)

Dan Kois wonders if, in the age of the internet, his daughter should have the kind of editorial control she wants. “The lesson of sharing your work with a family member is that sometimes the story you wrote in private becomes less precious to you when you face the possibility of hurting someone you love with it.” – The New York Times

Okorafor is already a star of the science fiction novel-writing community, and she penned some episodes of Marvel’s Shuri as well. But she’s also about to hit screens with an HBO series based on her book Who Fears Death and an Amazon Prime series that she and a co-author are adapting from Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed series. And the world can thank Michael Palin, Ben Okri, Tove Jansson, and The Very Hungry Caterpillar for inspiring her. – The Guardian (UK)

IDEK why ppl think txting & emojis aren’t language. “Any concerns about what the internet is doing to our collective mental health must be set against the poetry that it has simultaneously unleashed – the sheer range of textual innovation and expression that you can find on Tumblr or Twitter or even TikTok, the way three dots, or a question without a question mark, or ‘idk lol’ can become loaded with meaning – The Guardian (UK)

“The original manuscript of the story no longer exists, with the oldest versions of the story believed to have been transcribed by the poet Teika, who died in 1241. Until now, just four chapters of the 54-chapter story are confirmed to be Teika’s transcriptions, but now a fifth chapter, which depicts Genji’s encounter with the girl who becomes his wife, Murasaki, has also been identified as Teika’s. The manuscript had been kept in an oblong chest in a storeroom at the Tokyo home of Motofuyu Okochi, a descendant of [a] former feudal lord.” – The Guardian

Social media lit up with outrage when Handke’s win was announced, and criticism came from some (seemingly) surprising quarters. Albania’s acting foreign minister said the award was “an ignoble and shameful act.” PEN America, in an unprecedented move, publicly condemned the Swedish Academy for its choice. What’s the reason for all the anger? It goes back to the post-Yugoslav wars. – Slate

When a linguistic shift is too heavy-handed, too obviously driven by an agenda to change hearts and minds, it can run up against a response known as reactance. Reactance is our mind’s instinctive defense against the attempts of others to control our thoughts and behavior. – Nautilus

Fragments of a manuscript of Le Roman de la Rose — containing a double entendre-filled episode about a pilgrim at a shrine — were found in a centuries-old book binding in the public records office of the English city of Worcester. – Live Science

The Nobel committee cited Polish novelist Tokarczuk, awarded the delayed prize for 2018, for “a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.” Austrian prose author, poet and dramatist Handke was cited for “an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience.” – The Guardian

“The question goes beyond whether or not Whitman should be banished from the literary forum, if such a thing were even possible. If America can be said to have a national poet, if “O Captain! My Captain!” is still memorized by schoolchildren, then the fact of Whitman is burned into America’s signature.” – Los Angeles Review of Books

Orphaned protagonists are so common that an online encyclopaedia of narrative tropes has more than 25 pages on orphan-related themes, including ‘Street Urchin’ (Oliver Twist), ‘Disappeared Dad’ (Forrest Gump) and ‘Doorstop Baby’ (Harry Potter). – Aeon

“African historical fiction is far from a new genre – is there a more globally known work of African fiction, after all, than Chinua Achebe’s 1958 classic story of Nigeria at the moment of British colonization, Things Fall Apart? But in recent years, the genre has been reinvented by a new generation of African writers. And this time around, most of them are women.” – The Christian Science Monitor