Listen to the latest episode of the 2 Dope Queens podcast, in which Year in Reading alum Roxane Gay drops knowledge about how to write a killer memoir.
A Toast to the Good Life
Why Words Matter
“The hijacking of public language, as is happening now, is a way to shift perception—to bend and control thought—and must be resisted.” Summer Brennan pens a powerful first entry for her twice-monthly column about language and power at The Literary Hub. Read also our own Lydia Kiesling, who tells us, “I have to believe that literature can be a weapon of a sort — it explodes comfort even while it delivers comfort; it reveals hypocrisy in a way that the mere presentation of facts often cannot.”
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More on Stefan Zweig
Wes Anderson’s latest movie sparked a minor literary revival after it came out that much of it was based on the works of Stefan Zweig. Jason Diamond argued that Zweig may finally be getting the due he deserves in America. At the LARB, Tara Isabella Burton reads the author’s collected stories.
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All About the New
20 Under 40 alum and A Better Angel author Chris Adrian teamed up with Eli Horowitz to publish a digital novel with Atavist Books. The novel, titled The New World, employs new storytelling techniques made possible by Atavist software. It’s worth remembering here that the first book Atavist published was written by fellow 20-Under-40er Karen Russell.
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The Finnish Word for Author is “Kirjailija”
Jill Timbers, the translator charged with converting J.K. Rowling’s next book into Finnish, will have to complete the 480-page project in just three weeks. She writes about the work over here, and then adds some more information on the Three Percent blog.
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I’d Like to Thank…
“It is not, however, fashionable to love acknowledgments, and for good reason: Most of them are numbingly predictable in their architecture, little Levittowns of gratitude.” In her last piece for The New York Times as a daily book critic, Jennifer Senior writes about her unabashed love for acknowledgements in books. From our archives: Henriette Lazaridis‘s essay on the same topic.