If you haven’t taken The New York Times’s regional dialect quiz, try The New Yorker’s satirical version instead. “What do you call a grassy area with gravestones and bodies in it? Goth cotillion.”
How Youse, Yix Talk
You Already Know This Because You Read
"[L]overs of more experimental books showed the ability to see things from different perspectives but it was comedy fans who scored the highest for relating to others." A new study suggests that people who read books are nicer, reports The Independent. In our recent interview with author John Vaillant he wholly agreed. "Empathy is what gives you the access," he told us. "I see the writer (fiction or nonfiction) as a kind of permeable membrane through which the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of others can pass and manifest."
An Ashtray Instead of a Computer
FSG's outstanding Work in Progress series drops in on the offices of Lapham's Quarterly founder Lewis Lapham.
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Veering Bogward
At The Rumpus, Shawn Andrew Mitchell reviews Dark Lies the Island, the new short story collection by the Irish writer Kevin Barry. Mitchell quotes a number of the book’s more interesting idioms and perceives “an impolitic decadence to how Barry couples his words.” (Related: we interviewed Barry a few weeks ago.)
An Experiment In Crowdsourced Development
Palgrave Macmillan is posting sample chapters from book proposals online, inviting comment “from anyone who feels they can contribute to the development of the works in question.” The trial will continue for the next six weeks.
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Authors Upon Authors
The Guardian asked a bunch of authors, including Hilary Mantel, Geoff Dyer, and Ian Rankin, which books they "regularly reread and which novels they are desperate to unlock the secrets of." Check out John Banville's abiding fixation on the works on F. Scott Fitzgerald.
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An Industry of Translation
"As for the charge that [Constance] Garnett writes in an outdated language, yes, here and there she uses words and phrases that no one uses today, but not many of them. We find the same sprinkling of outdated words and phrases in the novels of Trollope and Dickens and George Eliot. Should they, too, be rewritten for modern sensibilities? (Would u really want that?)" It's shaping up to be a day of passionate defenses. Writing for the New York Review of Books, Janet Malcom urges readers to put down their Pevear/Volokhonsky translations of Russian classics and pick Constance Garnett's back up again.
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