“Crossover words are a tremendous testament to our awesome ability to shape the language as we use it. To master our fears. To take our terror and use it to build something terrific.” – Arika Okrent writes for The Week about irony, slang and the way language changes.
From Terror to Terrific
Start Something New
A Betsy Lerner follower asks Betsy what to do when you hit the wall at page 60 of your novel–of every novel you try to write. Betsy’s answer? Try novellas.
Introducing Literary Hub
Introducing a new literary site: Electric Literature and Grove Atlantic have combined forces to create Literary Hub, a site that will collect bookish news and articles from around the web.
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Carl Köhler in Toronto
The University of Toronto now has a webpage up for its current exhibition “Beyond the Words: Author Portraits by Carl Köhler.” See some of Köhler’s remarkable portraits of artists and intellectuals and read about him here.
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“I’ll Read Anything”
“If the sentences are meticulously made, I’ll read anything, whether it’s as destabilizing as a Gary Lutz short story or as melancholy as a Chris Ware comic. The only books I give up on are texts where the writer’s attention is concentrated so heavily on narrative questions that his or her use of language becomes careless.” Anthony Doerr, whose All The Light We Cannot See won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, discusses genre, Calvin and Hobbes, and the 2,080 books he still wants to read as part of the New York Times Book Review‘s By the Book series.
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The Cool Kids
Tim Weiner Knows Every Secret Ever
Tim Weiner won the Pulitzer Prize for Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. Then, four years after its publication, he received a box of J. Edgar Hoover’s “personal files on [FBI] intelligence operations between 1945 and 1972” from a well-connected D.C. lawyer. That treasure trove of information has since wound up in his recently published book, Enemies: A History of the FBI, and he sat with NPR’s Terry Gross to talk all about it.
In Poor Taste
“Some of the most impassioned conversation in the literary world has been devoted to highlighting what it lacks: voices of people of color, of gays and lesbians, of those marginalized or oppressed or simply ignored. Look a little closer, however, and you’ll notice this conversation focuses on race and gender while paying less attention to a demographic category that’s arguably just as determinative: class.” Adam Fleming Petty on the marginalization of working class lit.
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