si parla dell'International Booker prize 2024
Rassegna della stampa culturale americana e inglese. Segnalazioni di novità in libreria, articoli, interviste, dibattiti, idee e pettegolezzi.
21.4.24
Latin American authors on rise
14.4.24
Crosswords
Word games are knotty, paradoxical devices. They offer players the illusion of control: What could be tidier than a Scrabble board, or the orderly grid of a crossword puzzle? But they are possible only because language is untamable, flush with connotations and insinuations that we cannot hope to systematize.
No one knows this better than Anna Shechtman, who confronts the waywardness of words both in her capacity as a literature professor at Cornell University and as a contributor of crosswords to the New Yorker. Shechtman was a precocious constructor, as authors of crosswords are called (at least when they are not called, somewhat grandiosely, cruciverbalists); her puzzles were first published in the New York Times when she was in college.[...]
Crossword clues are supposed to draw on “common knowledge,” but who are the proprietors of this mystical article? Is there any such thing? And perhaps most important, can constructors neutralize the chaos of language, with its mad tumult of jostling meanings? Should they even try?
These are some of the questions Shechtman poses in “The Riddles of the Sphinx,” a book too mischievously multiform to classify. Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post
The Riddle of the Sphinx è pubblicato da HarperOne.
7.4.24
The Last Caravaggio
“The Last Caravaggio” shows at the National Gallery, London WC2, from 18 April to 21 July 2024
31.3.24
OLIVETTI
una storia per ragazzini delle elementari che sembra molto carina
24.3.24
Romantasy, AI and Palestinian voices
Future publishing priorities also included sustainability, neurodivergent protagonists and new retellings of Greek mythology. Ella Creamer, The Guardian
me ne starò alla larga...
17.3.24
When Marilynne Robinson Reads Genesis
il nuovo libro di Marilynne Robinson si intitola Reading Genesis ed è uscito da Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
10.3.24
The Delicate Art of Making Fictional Languages
3.3.24
A Country Shaped By Poetry
In Somaliland, poems were often recited to pass the time by men leading camel trains and by women weaving mats to cover their domed huts. Like the lives of the nomadic people who spoke them, the poems were cyclical. When their speakers moved, they brought their animals and their poetry. At each stop along this annual migration, the women would reuse the verses as they built their thatched homes and the men would recite them as they moved their herds to water.
But poems also served a utilitarian, public purpose: they could be
deployed to argue a court case or to make peace between warring
families. And their lines were powerful in ways few other nations could
understand. In Somaliland, an autonomous region perched at the northern
tip of Somalia, poetry had sparked wars, toppled governments, and
offered paths to peace. Nina Strochlic, Noema
25.2.24
Reading is so sexy
18.2.24
Five of the best books about gossip
Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare
The play’s title is a triple entendre: in Elizabethan England, “nothing” was slang for “vagina”, and was pronounced as “no-ting”, suggesting “noticing” – a nod to the gossip and eavesdropping that carve the plot. A conversation about Beatrice’s “love” for Benedick is staged for Benedick to overhear, and vice versa, which leads to the pair getting together. Later, Borachio is overheard bragging about tricking Claudio by pretending to woo his love interest, Hero, and is arrested.
questo è uno dei cinque libri sui pettegolezzi consigliati da Ella Creamer, The Guardian
11.2.24
A Brief History of the United States’ Accents and Dialects
What’s the difference between these two linguistic terms? Accents center on the pronunciation of words, while dialects encompass pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. They both often vary by region. Megan Ulu-Lani Boyanton, Smithsonian
(Nella foto: New Orleans)
4.2.24
The new generation of novelists writing about motherhood
28.1.24
Exclamation Point!
If you’re a woman who works in a traditionally male-dominated industry, chances are high that you’ve heard some version of this advice: when you finish writing your email, go through and replace all the exclamation points with periods. This well-intentioned advice is based on three regressive ideas [...] Anne Helen Petersen, Culture Study
21.1.24
The CIA’s Creative Writing Group
I asked Vivian (not her real name) what she wanted me to talk about.
She said that the topic of the talk was entirely up to me.
I asked what level the writers in the group were.
She said the group had writers of all levels.
I asked what the speaking fee was.
She said that as far as she knew, there was no speaking fee.
I dwelled a little on this point.
She confirmed that there was no speaking fee.
When an organization has, say, financed the overthrow of the government of Guatemala, you would think there might be a speaking fee. But I was told that, in lieu of payment, the writing group would take me out to lunch in the executive dining room afterward. I would also have my picture taken in front of the CIA seal, and I could post that picture anywhere I wanted. Johannes Lichtman, The Paris Review
molto divertente!
14.1.24
Università americane in declino?
Why, in the last 10 years, have elite colleges in particular become sites of such relentless ideological confrontation? Len Gutkin, The Chronicle of Higher Education
The rise of the extremely productive researcher: Some researchers publish a new paper every five days, on average. Data trackers suspect not all their manuscripts were produced through honest labour. Gemma Conroy, nature