OLIVETTI

A magical typewriter brings healing, reconnection, and new friends to a hurting family. Olivetti, a silent but fully conscious typewriter, has been there since the beginning, living with parents Felix and Beatrice and their children, Ezra, Adalyn, Ernest, and Arlo, a “copper-colored family with eyes as rich as ink.” Olivetti, who even took part in Felix’s proposal to Beatrice, watched playfulness and creativity grow as the children arrived, and he faithfully remembers every single word the people have typed. Then, longing to communicate, he watched the family suffer through Everything That Happened. Which is exactly what seventh grader Ernest is still trying to forget. Kirkus

una storia per ragazzini delle elementari che sembra molto carina

Romantasy, AI and Palestinian voices

Palestine, artificial intelligence and romantasy were high on the agenda at this week’s London book fair.

Future publishing priorities also included sustainability, neurodivergent protagonists and new retellings of Greek mythology. Ella Creamer, The Guardian

me ne starò alla larga... 

When Marilynne Robinson Reads Genesis

[...] Robinson should be an ideal reader of Genesis, of its richly compacted human stories and their sharp details: Noah, drunk and naked in his tent, his state witnessed by his son Ham, although not by his two other sons, who walk into his tent backward to avoid the filial shame; or Jacob, tricking his elder brother, Esau, out of his birthright and winning his father’s blessing (“Do you have only one blessing, my father?” Esau cries on discovering what’s happened. “Bless me, too, my father!”); or the long story of Joseph and his envious brothers ... James Wood, The New Yorker

il nuovo libro di Marilynne Robinson si intitola Reading Genesis ed è uscito da Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

The Delicate Art of Making Fictional Languages

Engineered languages such as the one Chalamet speaks [in Dune, n.d.r] represent a new benchmark in imaginative fiction. Twenty years ago, viewers would have struggled to name franchises other than “Star Trek” or “The Lord of the Rings” that bothered to invent new languages. Today, with the budgets of the biggest films and series rivalling the G.D.P.s of small island nations, constructed languages, or conlangs, are becoming a norm, if not an implicit requirement. Breeze through entertainment from the past decade or so, and you’ll find lingos designed for Paleolithic peoples (“Alpha”), spell-casting witches (“Penny Dreadful”), post-apocalyptic survivors (“Into the Badlands”), Superman’s home planet of Krypton (“Man of Steel”), a cross-species alien alliance (“Halo”), time-travelling preteens (“Paper Girls”), the Munja’kin tribe of Oz (“Emerald City”), and Santa Claus and his elves (“The Christmas Chronicles” and its sequel). Manvir Singh, The New Yorker

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

Reading is so sexy

They have killed skinny jeans and continue to shame millennials for having side partings in their hair. They think using the crying tears emoji to express laughter is embarrassing. But now comes a surprising gen Z plot twist. One habit that those born between 1997 and 2012 are keen to endorse is reading – and it’s physical books rather than digital that they are thumbing. Chloe Mac Donnell, The Guardian

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

A Brief History of the United States’ Accents and Dialects

The United States may lack an official language, but a road trip across the country reveals dozens of different accents and dialects of English that serve as living links to Americans’ ancestors.

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)

The new generation of novelists writing about motherhood

Recent novels of motherhood explore work and identity, creation and loss, love, ambivalence, even regret. They are political without being didactic, furious and funny. If they could be said to have one thing in common, it is their corporeality. They are all unflinchingly of the body. Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, The Guardian

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