Okay, so the deal with the famed and occasionally disdained New Yorker umlaut on words like “cooperate” is that it is not an umlaut, it is a diaeresis, and they’ll be holding onto it, thank you very much.
The Curse of the Diaeresis
On Reviewers, and Paying Them
LA Review of Books editor in chief Tom Lutz has written about the future of book reviews and “a missing generation of journalists.”
Weird Science
“I do remember thinking ‘You can’t get involved in the particle physics of fantasy.’ You can take it down to a certain level but if you get too involved in the particle physics then it’s not [useful] to continue. So I guess we have a branch of science that even its practitioners do not understand, that they may as well call magic.” Talking with David Mitchell.
Elliott Holt Talks Anton Chekhov
“On the surface ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ is a love story,” writes Elliott Holt in a blog post for The Missouri Review. “[It’s] a romantic one at that, but it’s also about the tension between the person we show the world and the one we keep to ourselves. The older I get, the more the story resonates with me.”
Longlist Released for the Guardian First Book Award
The Guardian picked its longlist for the 15th annual First Book Award, and it features selections from both NoViolet Bulawayo and Donal Ryan – two authors named to this year’s Booker Longlist as well.