The other day, meeting with a publicist from a scholarly publishing house, I asked her a question: Does the press she works for think about the gender breakdown of its authors? I asked because I often do an informal VIDA-style count of the number of male and female authors represented in book catalogs. I do… Continue reading »
When Dictionaries Move Online
…surprising things happen. For instance, lexicographers can track word lookups and peg them to news. A celebrity death or political debate now becomes a “vocabulary event.” I spent the last few weeks talking to lexicographers about how dictionary-making changes when it goes digital (“In the Digital Era, Our Dictionaries Read Us“). For dictionary makers, going… Continue reading »
The Nine Lives (and Deaths) of the Short Story
Never has a literary genre been more zombified than the short story. It’s dead! It’s alive! Dead, alive! Here are the latest conflicting diagnoses: The New York Times’s Leslie Kaufman says that short stories are alive and kicking, souped up by digital delivery (“A Good Fit for Today’s Little Screens: Short Stories,” Feb. 15, 2013):… Continue reading »
A Very Brief Rant About Verbing
Rage, rage against the verbing of the noun (and the adjective). I’m sorry to have to tell you that at a recent publishers’ confab I heard speakers talk about “solutioning” and “obsoleting.” “Innovate” as a transitive verb is bad enough. (The dictionary says it’s okay, and I’m not going to argue with the dictionary.) But… Continue reading »
“You Can’t Do That With an Ebook”
We spend a lot of time at our local public library, which happens to be the D.C. Public Library’s Southeast branch, near Eastern Market. We check out books, of course–armfuls of them, because my offspring don’t believe in the one-book-at-a-time approach to reading. We also like to drop by the used-book sale the library has… Continue reading »
Reading Alone Together
When you look at this picture, what do you see? People reading, yes. Are they reading together or alone? I get a sense of alone-together from this group. Each is absorbed in his reading but it’s a companionable solitude, or so it looks to me. In a sense, though, every reader is always a solitary… Continue reading »
Bookstores Say “Boo!” to Amazon
Today’s Washington Post has a fascinating little story, tucked into the Style section, about some bookstores refusing to shelve books produced by Amazon. The boycotters include Washington’s own indie stalwart, Politics & Prose. If I go to P&P, I won’t find a copy of what sounds like a charming new novel, Care of Wooden Floors… Continue reading »
Let Content Dictate Form
One of the latest books to find its way into my house is Stephen Sondheim’s Finishing the Hat, a collection of his lyrics fortified with anecdotes and commentary and thoughts about writing. For Sondheim, that means writing songs, of course, but right off the bat he lays out some guidelines that almost any kind of… Continue reading »
“The End of Men,” or What Makes a Book Big?
I wasn’t going to write any more about Hanna Rosin’s new book, The End of Men. I already had my say. But the book and the response to it has got me thinking about what counts as a Big Book. Consider this a postscript to my WaPo review. If you follow bookish or pop-culture chatter… Continue reading »
I, Reader
I read a lot of fantasy as a kid: the Prydain series by Lloyd Alexander, The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, the Earthsea trilogy by Ursula LeGuin, Anne McCaffery’s Pern books, lots of C.S. Lewis (even The Screwtape Letters, oddly enough) and Tolkien (everything except The Silmarillion, although I tried). I read A Wrinkle in… Continue reading »
