Words

One novelist, who calls herself a Planner (as opposed to a Pantser), says, “What characters do when I let them loose on the page is often unexpected, but I never regret having nailed down what they see out their window as they lie down to sleep.” – LitHub

Amélie Wen Zhao asked her publisher to withhold her book Blood Heir after voices from the Young Adult Lit Twitterverse (which is notorious for drama) attacked it for “anti-blackness” in its depiction of an enslaved group. Aja Hoggatt offers an explainer on the controversy. — Slate

Kurdish-Iranian writer Behrouz Boochani composed his first book, No Friend But the Mountains, one text message at a time from inside the Manus Island detention center in Papua New Guinea, one of the offshore centers where Australia places refugees who try to reach the country by sea. Now that book has won the A$100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature. — The Guardian

At a time when half of all book purchases in the U.S. are made on Amazon — and many of those on mobile — the first job of a book cover, after gesturing at the content inside, is to look great in miniature. That means that where fine details once thrived, splashyprints have taken over, grounding text that’s sturdy enough to be deciphered on screens ranging from medium to miniscule. – New York Magazine

“Some forewords are transitive: acts of seduction that are at the same time documents of earlier seductions. … Other forewords are parasitical; like cuckoos’ eggs laid in crows’ nests they hatch and flourish at the expense of their hosts. … As for prefaces (and afterwords), these may be explanatory, apologetic, triumphal, tendentious, rueful, score-settling, spiteful, bibliographic, theoretical (as is the case with Chandler’s), or gently embarrassed (as is the case with Cheever’s) but the best of them — like Cheever’s — are also what I would call restorative.” — The Paris Review

There are now more comic books published annually in France and Belgium than ever before. “It’s a kind of golden age. There has never been so much talent. There have never been so many interesting books published.” – The New York Times

“[Bart van Es’s] The Cut Out Girl beat Sally Rooney’s widely praised novel Normal People, Stuart Turton’s debut novel The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, JO Morgan’s poetry collection Assurances and Hilary McKay’s children’s book The Skylarks’ War to the award for the year’s ‘most enjoyable’ book.” — The Guardian

With hedge fund the Man Group having announced that it will end its sponsorship of the English-speaking world’s leading literary award after this year, the literati are all wondering what changes might come to the Man Booker Prize — with some observers in Britain who are too chicken to compete worry about over-dominance by writers from the United States wondering if the 2014 decision to include them can be overturned. — The Guardian

This is the second Caldecott win in the span of four years for Blackall, whose Finding Winnie took the prize in 2016. Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X was given the Michael L. Printz Award for young adult literature. — The New York Times

“For years I have not participated in collective activities, especially if they force me to move from one continent to another. … The round table was a disaster, since the other two participants, very young, started a binge yesterday evening that has lasted throughout the day, and presented themselves in a deplorable state. As they are mystery authors, they feel obliged to show a degree of alcoholism that they may not have.” – El País (Spain)

The brothers’ adventures appealed to many young readers, as the boys filled their lives with adventures that always ended safely. But it’s also true that there were no gay characters and a paucity of characters of color – and racism throughout, despite decades of revisions. Still, there was Chet. “There was always something delightfully transgressive about the fact that Chet’s car, depicted in the books as the ‘pride’ of his life, is named The Queen.” – The Atlantic

There’s been a dramatic shift in the demographics of who’s buying poetry, and giving poets including Rupi Kaur, Carol Ann Duffy, Helen Dunmore and other women six-figure incomes in the UK alone. And the topics have changed as well. – The Observer (UK)

Can we stop calling it the “Man Booker” after the Man Group pulls out? Yes, but, well, we may be part of the problem: “Relations between Man Group and Booker organisers had been strained for some time, with a company source suggesting they felt underappreciated.” – BBC

The imprint, founded by Cindy Spiegel and Julie Grau, had one of its most successful years in 2018, but even if it hadn’t, the imprint had a prestigious run of best-selling nonfiction. What gives? “Penguin Random House, which houses around 275 imprints worldwide and generates some $4 billion annually, has begun to look for ways to streamline its publishing lines.” – The New York Times

Young Virginia Stephen’s quick and fierce tongue, her nickname of Goat, and her ability to pierce her siblings’ consciousness with deeper thoughts and questions than they had – all seem to presage Virginia Woolf the Writer. And then there was the depression. – LitHub

“Visitors to Mail Online who use Microsoft Edge can now see a statement asserting that ‘this website generally fails to maintain basic standards of accuracy and accountability’ and ‘has been forced to pay damages in numerous high-profile cases’. The message, which is produced by a third-party startup called NewsGuard, tells readers to proceed carefully given that ‘the site regularly publishes content that has damaged reputations, caused widespread alarm, or constituted harassment or invasion of privacy’.” — The Guardian

“Established in 1948 and awarded every two years, the Bollingen Prize is administered by … Yale University’s Beinecke Library and brings a cash award of $165,000. The prize recognizes either the best poetry book of the previous two years or a poet’s lifetime achievement.” With Bernstein, a professor at Penn, it’s “something of both.” — The Philadelphia Inquirer

Jill Lepore: “There’s no shortage of amazing journalists at work, clear-eyed and courageous, broad-minded and brilliant, and no end of fascinating innovation in matters of form, especially in visual storytelling. Still, journalism, as a field, is as addled as an addict, gaunt, wasted, and twitchy, its pockets as empty as its nights are sleepless. It’s faster than it used to be, so fast. It’s also edgier, and needier, and angrier. It wants and it wants and it wants. But what does it need?” – The New Yorker

“I have no objection at all to being African, in fact it is all I know how to be and so I cannot possibly be anything else. And so my answer to the question “Are you an African Writer?” was no, and not because I am not proudly African. … I said no because I have increasingly been troubled by the subtle and not-so-subtle constraints that the question implies.” — New Statesman

“At the Edge of Night, by Friedo Lampe, was first published in 1933. … The [Nazi] regime objected to the novel’s inclusion of homoerotic content, and its depiction of an interracial liaison between a black man and a German woman. The book was placed on their list of ‘damaging and undesirable writings’.” Yet it was praised by no less than Hermann Hesse in 1933, and it has gained admirers since the uncensored version was published in Germany in 1999. — The Guardian

Doesn’t translating a work of literature inevitably involve moving things around and altering many of the relations between the words in the original? In which case, either the original’s alleged perfection has been overstated, or the translation is indeed, as pessimists have often supposed, a fine but somewhat flawed copy.  – New York Review of Books

Is it fair to say it’s a mongrel language, drawing influence from all over. So it is important to remember that the formation of English was influenced by a huge range of ethnic and geographical forces. The emerging ‘England’ of this period was a melting pot. – BBC

“[Founded in 1897 and] once known as The Jewish Daily Forward, the [Yiddish] publication first put out supplements in English in the 1980s and started a weekly edition in English in 1990. Since 2017, The Forward has been a monthly magazine. It will continue to publish in both languages online after it stops appearing on newsstands.” Almost a third of the staff, including editor-in-chief Jane Eisner, has been laid off. — The New York Times

“The death of the Forward‘s print edition, and the slashes to its masthead, cap off decades of financial bleeding.” The publisher says the paper has run at a loss since 1945; recent losses have run to $5 million a year. The losses have been covered by drawing down its capital, which had already taken hits from the 2008 crash and Bernie Madoff’s scams. — Jewish Telegraphic Agency