More than 5,000 books in the Occupy Wall Street library were reportedly thrown away when police moved in to remove protesters from Zuccotti Park in New York early Tuesday. A judge has signed an order allowing protesters to return to Zuccotti Park with their belongings; further court action is expected Tuesday. What that means for the books, no one yet knows.
5000 Books Thrown Out in OWS Raid
Bookcase Biases
“What people call you shapes how you see yourself, and teaches you how to navigate the world. But the moment you name something, you limit the possibilities of what it can be.” Marie Elia, who was trained as a cataloguing librarian, argues that our biases affect the way we describe books at Queen Mob’s Teahouse. Pair with our essay on “A Library of the Mind.”
“Stupidity stalks us all”
Following the example of Flaubert, whose Dictionary of Received Ideas compiled the clichés of its day, Teju Cole set out on Monday to record his own clichés on Twitter. At Page-Turner, he sums up his experiment in a blog post. (You may recall that this is not the first time Cole has won acclaim for his Twitter account.)
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Not Your Father’s Canon
Electric Literature has launched the "Read More Women" series—a "stripped-down, feminist version" of the New York Times "By the Book" column—which will feature writers recommending books by women and non-binary authors. First up in the series is Maria Dahvana Headley, author of The Mere Wife.
Ancient Poetics
Recommended Reading: Chloe Garcia Roberts and Guangchen Chen on translating ninth century poet Li Shangyin.
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Don DeLillo’s Secret (Seventh) Book
Don DeLillo’s seventh book was his first big hit, but you’d never know it from looking at the work’s cover or title page. That’s because he wrote Amazons: An Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey League under the pseudonym, Cleo Birdwell. (Bonus: DeLillo’s 2009 story, “Midnight in Dostoevsky” was released from the New Yorker archive this week.)
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The Pointless Adventure
Many writing guides feature long explainers that detial how to craft a great plot. They’ve turned the phrase “rising action” into a buzzword in many classes. At Page-Turner, a short comic illustrating major plots that don’t work, including one in which the protagonist “ignores the problem until it goes away.”
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