Tstisi Dangarembga, novelist and filmmaker: “We are never completely free; we have moments of freedom. Freedom is a desire. Achieving it requires us to move towards it.” - El País English
Hurray for research! “The archivist led her into a reading room and handed her a cream-coloured box. She lifted the lid, hands shaking, and opened the volume. There, professionally typed, were revised versions of the NYPL stories, with hundreds of stylistic changes.” - The Guardian (UK)
How about this one, from 1929? “In Out of the Void, Stone didn’t imagine the future so much as she imagined a different present. Imagine, she asked her readers, … that the oppressed could rise up and achieve justice for themselves and the generations to come after them.” - Reactor
“The beauty, the moral authority, of high Christian tradition is just very persuasive. The beauty of it all seems right. It seems as if it opens the universe in a way that very few kinds of thinking actually do.” - The New York Times
“We have been living in a moment of constant crisis and existential dread for years now. Many use this as the reason horror is having a moment, but I say it is more the icing on the horror cake.” - People
Those who love books in this rough time should probably do a little more to keep the literary community going. For instance: “Give yourself permission to enjoy things. And remember that being earnest is best.” - LitHub
831 Books truly, deeply understands its audience (you know, the audience whose dollars fund all other publishing?). “You love holding a book that almost feels like an accessory, like a fashion piece and statement.” - NPR
“Fyodor Dostoevsky — rigorous dialectician and grand inquisitor into the human soul — is having a moment. The American ‘new right’ has enlisted the Russian author in the debate over ‘cancel culture’; simultaneously, his lesser-known works are receiving unprecedented attention among Gen Z, thanks, in no small part, to TikTok.” - Prospect (UK)
“Now, with more than 10,000 regularly working narrators, audiobooks are at the height of diversity casting, but the product can no longer be for the ear and the imagination alone. The actor’s appearance, personal information, social media and politics are also in play.” - Los Angeles Times (Yahoo!)
The 12th edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary comes 22 years after the book’s last hard-copy update. To make room for the new words (including “hard pass,” “beast mode,” and “adulting”), publishers removed sections which listed and defined places (“Kalamazoo”) and people (“Rimsky-Korsakov”) which people no longer use dictionaries to find. - AP
The shortlist includes Indian-born author Kiran Desai, 19 years after she won the prize, as well as past nominees Andrew Miller and David Szalay. A trio of US writers - Susan Choi, Katie Kitamura and Ben Markovits - will also be up for the prize when the winner is announced in November. - BBC
Humans do not think or speak in sentences; we think and speak in thoughts, which interrupt and introduce and complicate one another in a neat little dance that creates larger, more complex ideas. - The New York Times Magazine
