I'm A Fan

The protagonist of Sheena Patel’s corrosive, brilliant debut, a 30-year-old arts freelancer living in south London, is fanatical about two individuals: “the man I want to be with” “the woman I am obsessed with”, who is also having an affair with “the man I want to be with”.[...]

Patel offers no way out from the brutal arena of fandom into which she organises human life. But what makes I’m a Fan so successful is the protagonist’s ability to interpret and critique the toxicity of these structures even as she is caught inside them. She recognises, with shattering clarity, that if she goes on like this she could “turn out to be the man I want to be with in all the ways I don’t want to be”. Lamorna Ash, The Guardian

il romanzo di cui si parla è I'm A Fan, di Sheena Patel (Rough Trade Books). Inoltre un bell'articolo (purtroppo solo per abbonati) sui lessicografi dietro l'Oxford English Dictionary. 

From aardvark to woke: inside the Oxford English Dictionary The OED’s task – to define every part of the world’s most spoken language – is as ambitious as it was 150 years ago. 

The team at the Oxford English Dictionary felt some nervousness about writing the definition for “Terf”, an acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminist, which this month has been added to its pages. “To a certain extent, it is like any other word,” says Fiona McPherson, a 50-year-old lexicographer from Grangemouth, Stirlingshire, who has worked at the dictionary since 1997. “But it would be disingenuous to say that it is exactly the same. There seems more at stake. You want to be accurate, you want to be neutral. But it’s a lot easier to be neutral about a word that isn’t controversial.” Pippa Bailey, The New Statesman