I am just a reporter, author and storyteller in a small province in Canada, a journalist devoted to covering seemingly prosaic concerns distant from the epic struggles, or literary hot spots, that marked the careers of Whitman, Hitchens and Havel. But lazy thinking and equivocation are universal, as is the need for clear thinking and clear writing.
The question of why people read literature continues to perplex. The usual assumption is that people read for pleasure and, of course, reading is pleasurable. But does this mean it’s like eating chocolate? That doesn’t seem quite the right idea.
Font wars are usually little spats among the cognoscenti, and very welcome, too; they generate publicity and informed debate. But this war had spilled out beyond its normal narrow confines.
Simon Garfield/The National Post
Harper Perennial’s model isn’t unique, but it’s an intriguing case study in what an imprint needs to do to distinguish itself in an increasingly stratified market. What it does is innovative and exciting, but also traditional.
Kevin Canfield/Salon
“There is no thing that with a twist of the imagination cannot be something else,” he said in an early work, whereby he could both use flowers as an image of lovely womanhood and speak of pathology as a “flower garden.” The principle made for great mobility, for constant transformations that might affect a writer in late years somewhat like trying to run a hundred yards in ten seconds flat.
Kenneth Burke/New York Review of Books
The Sins of Vanity (publishing)
(via Bark)
For Duncan the title is self-proclaimed. “When I say I’m a master palindromist, there are two answers for what that means,” he explained. “One is that it means, when it comes to palindrome-writing, I know what I’m doing. The other, slightly longer…”
Gregory Kornbluh/The Believer
In our own time, few writers depict the ambiguities of sexual connection better than Alice Munro. Her stories tend to focus on the relational and the way in which actions of the unconscious, or barely conscious, mind affect others.
In discussing these results, Paul Harris (2000) suggested that it wasn’t literacy as such that had the effect, but whether the respondents were able to use their imagination, as they had as children when they were playing. Introduction to literacy and reading, Harris argued, enabled them to do this…
Full of vitality and humour, she seems to contradict her black, Gothic artwork. Hale’s worked with black since her first charcoal sketches. Much of the furniture in her house is black, and even in the 1950s she was wearing black gowns to dances. Working with black pleases her. Gallons of black paint sit in her kitchen.
Mike Landry/The Telegraph Journal
