“There are two extreme views about punctuation … the first is that you don’t actually need it because it’s perfectly possible to write down what you want to say without any punctuation marks or capital letters and people can still read it youdontevenneedspacesbetweenwordsreally. The second view is that punctuation is essential, not only to avoid ambiguity but also because it ‘shows our identity as educated people.’” Here is Adrienne Raphel from The New Yorker with a history of punctuation in the internet age.
Whoreallyknows?
Money Problems
Recommended Reading: Does commercial literature hurt literary fiction?
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Fail Better
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Appearing Elsewhere
My piece in memory of novelist and rapier-tongued pundit Gore Vidal, who died Tuesday, appears on Prospero, the online arts & culture publication of The Economist.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Wallace, Kingsolver, Schutt, Millet, Kramer, Wagman, Gillespie, Pullman, Sacks, Jackson
There are plenty of new books to this week to fill that post-election void: Both Flesh and Not: Essays, a posthumously published collection from David Foster Wallace; Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior; Prosperous Friends by Christine Schutt; Magnificence by Lydia Millet; and These Things Happen, a debut by longtime TV writer Richard Kramer. From the indies, we have The Care and Feeding of Exotic Pets by Diana Wagman and Keyhole Factory by William Gillespie. Also out are Philip Pullman’s new version of Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm; Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks; and a big new Michael Jackson biography by a former Rolling Stone editor.
Junot Diaz on What is a Writer
Junot Díaz writes in O. Magazine about the harrowing, doubt-and-terror-filled decade-plus he spent writing his Pulitzer-prize winning first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
Tuesday New Release Day: Harrison; Heidegger; Molina; Hornby; Newlyn
Out this week: Brown Dog by Jim Harrison; a new paperback edition of Heidegger’s Poetry, Language, Thought; In the Night of Time by Antonio Muñoz Molina; a collection of Nick Hornby’s Believer columns; and a new biography of William and Dorothy Wordsworth.