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In September, just days before Borders Group met its end, one of the chain’s last retail holdouts, in the Nashville suburb of Brentwood, Tenn., was being liquidated, with prices slashed by 90 percent. It was difficult in the stark surroundings not to think of a battle waged and lost, of the armies of Kindle owners and e-book peddlars off celebrating victory while all around lay the carnage—two copies of a Paul Reiser memoir, the suspect Greg Mortensen book Stones into Schools , a still-brimming manga section. A couple of professional scavengers picked over the DVDs, cataloging them with their own scanners. Empty shelves were being stacked in the store’s growing hollows and themselves tagged with prices ranging from $25 to $50.
The End of Borders and the Future of Books - Businessweek
Reviews
Joseph Heller: There's only one catch - his best book is Something Happened. Photograph: Todd Plitt/AP Why is it that the book for which an author is best known is rarely their best? If history is the final judge of literary achievement, why has a title like Louis de Bernières' Captain Corelli's Mandolin risen to the top, overshadowing his much better earlier novels such as Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord ? It's not, I hope, the simple snobbery of insisting that the most popular can't be the finest.
Famous for the wrong book | Books | guardian.co.uk
Literally – the much misused word of the moment | Media | The Guardian
Jamie Redknapp … 'That cross to Rooney was literally on a plate.' Photograph: Nick Harvey/WireImage I was sitting in a cafe – one of those generic pain au raisin and latte joints, with an earnest singer-songwriter soundtrack to boot – when a kid to my left piped up: "My school gym is like literally 500 years old." His friends nodded with conviction. They understood.
Word for Word - Lapham’s Quarterly
I t has become something of a literary cliché to bash the thesaurus, or at the very least, to warn fellow writers that it is a book best left alone. Some admonitions might be blunt, others wistful, as with Billy Collins musing on his rarely opened thesaurus. But beyond the romantic anthropomorphizing of words needing to break free from “the warehouse of Roget,” what of Collins’ more pointed criticism, that “there is no/such thing as a synonym”?
Posted by Patrick on July 20, 2011 Yesterday, in the Guardian, John Self wrote a very entertaining post about why it seems that so many authors' best known works are not their best works . He writes, "If someone reads Kurt Vonnegut's most famous book, Slaughterhouse-Five, and doesn't like it, I'll want to shout to them, "But it's rubbish! Cat's Cradle is much better!" This is the sort of argument that used to be unwinnable -- you'd say Slaughterhouse-Five is the best, I'd argue for Cat's Cradle, and in the end, after some fisticuffs, we'd agree to disagree and go have a beer.
You're Reading the Wrong Vonnegut: Or, why authors' best known books are often not their best books
We Can't Teach Students to Love Reading - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education
By Alan Jacobs While virtually anyone who wants to do so can train his or her brain to the habits of long-form reading, in any given culture, few people will want to. And that's to be expected.
Discussed: Epic Struggles, The Distance Between Masters and Hacks,Palindromic Taxonomy, A Convenient Ampersand, Cutting-Edge Work in Reversibility, Some Limitations of an Untrained Audience, A Strange Kind of Amazing, The Relationship Killer, Disproportionate Responses, A Surfeit of Calendars, A Deficit of Wool and Illusions In March 2010, Barry Duncan, master palindromist, was locked in an epic struggle with the alphabet. He was totally absorbed in the completion of a commissioned piece.
The Believer - Doubling in the Middle
Literary Review - John Sutherland on <i>The World of Others: From Quotations to Culture</i>
Academics like me are skilled users of turnitin.com. Never heard of it? Ask the nearest undergraduate and watch their cheek blanch. Turnitin is the trade's leading 'plagiarism detector'.
Susan Sontag: Notes On "Camp"
Published in 1964. Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described. One of these is the sensibility -- unmistakably modern, a variant of sophistication but hardly identical with it -- that goes by the cult name of "Camp."
The Millions : The Pleasures and Perils of Rereading
In his often anthologized essay “On Reading Old Books,” William Hazlitt wrote, “I hate to read new books. There are twenty or thirty volumes that I have read over and over again, and these are the only ones that I have any desire to ever read at all.” This is a rather extreme position on rereading, but he is not alone. Larry McMurtry made a similar point: “If I once read for adventure, I now read for security. How nice to be able to return to what won’t change. When I sit down at dinner with a given book, I want to know what I’m going to find.”Text Size BOSTON – Within the quiet pages of books, words are battling it out with a competitive fierceness that rivals Wall Street’s. New research examining the frequency of words used in books over more than 200 years reveals the rise and demise of various words through time and how social, technological and political change influence language. An international team of scientists investigated word histories using Google’s Ngram project, a database of words in seven languages developed from scanning and digitizing about 4 percent of the world’s texts. The researchers mined books printed in English, Spanish and Hebrew published between 1800 and 2008, a corpus of more than 10 million words. There’s a marked increase in the death rate of words that coincides with the modern print era, the researchers found.
Modern Era Brings Death To Words - Science News
Why Finish Books? by Tim Parks | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books
“Sir—” remarked Samuel Johnson with droll incredulity to someone too eager to know whether he had finished a certain book—“Sir, do you read books through?” Well, do we? Right through to the end?Now, as we move into the digital age, the well-made copy has come to occupy a familiar, almost nostalgic middle ground between the aura of an original and the ghostly quality of a computer file. A mass-produced paper book, though bulkier and more expensive, may continue to be more desirable because it carries with it this material presence. And presence means something—or it can, at least, in the hands of a good book designer.
Will paper books exist in the future? Yes, but they’ll look different
The story of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is told by a precocious grieving boy—in other words, a classic hindered narrator. Credit: promotional and production The following sentence may be familiar. “I decided that the dog was probably killed with the fork because I could not see any other wounds in the dog and I do not think you would stick a garden fork into a dog after it had died for some other reason, like cancer for example, or a road accident.” That’s Christopher, of course, who narrates The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. The “of course” creeps in because, if you’ve read the book, you’ll recognise his sweet robotic phrasing.
Broken English | Prospect Magazine
For a long time, many English speakers have felt that the language was going to the dogs. All around them, people were talking about “parameters” and “life styles,” saying “disinterested” when they meant “uninterested,” “fulsome” when they meant “full.” To the pained listeners, it seemed that they were no longer part of this language group. To others, the complainers were fogies and snobs.