When Munro won the Nobel Prize in 2013, the Swedish Academy called her “a master of the contemporary short story.” The queen of subtly intense psychological stories about the ways rural poverty grinds down those trapped in it, and the price of freedom, died last week. - Open Culture
By a human, that is. “I did an event with Leila Slimani where she said she thought her translators know her better than her family. She puts most of her consciousness and her life into her books, and we translators are more connected to them than anybody else.” - The Guardian (UK)
Witherspoon: “When there’s a big economic shift in the media business, it’s not the superhero movies or independent films we lose out on. It’s the middle, which is usually where women live. … So I decided to fund a company to make those kinds of movies.” - The New York Times
What Munro did was not so much write about women as write from inside them. When her characters don’t understand exactly what they’re feeling, she expresses it in such a way that you can both feel the confusion yourself and see beneath it to its cause. - The New Yorker
"What does it mean to defend writers amid a polarizing war? When should a group that promotes free expression for all take sides? And at a time of extreme humanitarian crisis that some see as genocide, is a commitment to big-tent dialogue a necessity, or a dodge?" - The New York Times
"On Tuesday, 97% of Condé Union members voted 'yes' on a three-year deal" settled after 18 months of negotiations. "The agreement, which averted a threatened strike from workers at the Met Gala, boosts wages by $3.6 million in total and converts company permalancers into full-time staffers." - The Hollywood Reporter
They call it “filler,” and it’s hard not to regard it as something bordering on the sublinguistic, an almost intolerable torturing of the magnificent instrument bequeathed to us by Shakespeare and his successors. - Hedgehog Review
"The videos often begin with … a person ripping the covers off a book. They are not vandals, however; they are bookbinders, taking part in a growing trend for replacing the covers of favourite works to make unique hardback editions, and posting about their creations on TikTok and Instagram." - The Observer (UK)
OK, bring back the 18th century: "Cordelia gets a romance. ... She gets her love, Edgar. King Lear gets to rule. The bad people are punished. The good people get rewarded." - Happy Dancing
“Tóibín is a master of silence and shadows; his subjects are abandonment, loss and denial – the things not said, the feelings not acted on.” - The Guardian (UK)
“It is a piece of sage advice, a writer’s mantra, that I have made good use of through the years and that I now pass on to you: Ah, fuck ‘em.” - LitHub
The earliest were Renaissance glossaries. “These forerunners did not set out to define every known word. Instead, they set a narrower goal of annotating technical terms circulating in particular professions.” Then things heated up. - Hyperallergic
“This store would probably still be a pipe dream if the book bans hadn’t happened,” said Groff, who has lived in Gainesville since 2006. “I want this for me too. I don’t want to live in a place where we stifle free expression.” - The New York Times
