"There are worse ways of groping through the opening murk of another miserable year. ... if you are going to take on a New Year Reading Project it is as well to get the rules straight." - Irish Times
"Many experts feel they are in a race against time. A 2018 study published in the Climate Risk Management journal assessed 1,232 archival repositories in the United States and found that nearly 99 percent were 'likely to be affected by at least one climate risk factor."' - The New York Times
Ghostwriters channel someone else’s voice and construct with it a book that has shape and texture, narrative arc and memorable characters, all without leaving fingerprints. Doing it well requires a tremendous amount of technical skill and an ego that is, at a minimum, flexible. - The New York Times
"(Michael Langlois's) approach, which combines the close linguistic and paleographical analysis of ancient writings with advanced scientific tools … can sometimes make long-gone inscriptions come back to life. Or it can bury them for good — as in his exposé involving (forged Dead Sea Scroll fragments)." - Smithsonian Magazine
The editor represents many things, and different things to every writer. It's a financial relationship. It's an approval relationship. It's a technical relationship. It can be a close one or it can not. Some writers don't want to be social with their editors. Others need to talk to them constantly. - NPR
"Strangely enough, while the number of ham operators is declining globally, it's growing in the United States, as is Morse code, by all accounts. … Equipment sellers have noticed this trend, too." - Smithsonian Magazine
"While White Noise is intentionally specific to 1985, the tendencies described have only intensified. … The same tensions DeLillo mined so eloquently still grip us. How to be human amid the ubiquity and velocity of data, the endless streams of non-sequiturs, the static of modern life." - The New York Times Book Review
On the company’s Books app, searching for “AI narration” reveals the catalogue of works included in the scheme, which are described as being “narrated by digital voice based on a human narrator”. - The Guardian
"Ms. Magazine was a brazen act of independence when it launched 50 years ago. First introduced to the world as an insert in New York Magazine, Ms. demonstrated the potential for journalism that centered news and analysis around women and their lives and made a feminist worldview more accessible to the public." - New York Magazine
"A book by Thorvaldur Fridriksson, an Icelandic archaeologist and journalist, argues that Gaelic-speaking Celtic settlers from Ireland and western Scotland had a profound impact on the Icelandic language, landscape and early literature." And also, as it turns out, the Icelanders' DNA. - The Guardian
Rosemary Tonks was suceessful critically, commercially, and socially. Then a series of life crises in the 1970s led her to convert to fundamentalist Christianity, destroy her manuscripts, forbid further publication of her work, and even check out her books from libraries and burn them in her backyard. - The New Yorker
Modest as the festivities have been, I am certain that in 100 years there will be no poem whose centenary is the object of comparable celebration. This seems to me true for the simple reason that poetry is dead. Indeed, it is dead in part because Eliot helped to kill it. - The New York Times
"For years, someone impersonated authors and agents, editors and publishers, trying to steal unpublished book manuscripts from high profile authors … and writers of more obscure works. … On Friday, Filippo Bernardini is expected to plead guilty to wire fraud in front of a magistrate court judge in Manhattan." - The New York Times
Many writers and other figures are calling for Bulgakov's home in Kiev, a museum since Soviet days, to be closed, arguing that he was very much against Ukrainian independence and insulted Ukrainians in his novel The White Guard. Ukraine's culture minister is resisting the demands. - The Observer (UK)
