The Leo Strauss Center. Literature-Map - The tourist map of literature. A Critic’s Tour of Literary Manhattan. In it, Mr. Shteyngart lamented what’s happened to bookish night life in New York City over the past decade. “There are so few people to drink with,” he said. “The literary community is not backing me up here.
I’m all alone.” Mr. Shteyngart, who was born in Russia, added: “It’s pathetic when I think about my ancestors. Is Manhattan’s literary night life, along with its literary infrastructure (certain bars, hotels, restaurants and bookstores) fading away? Before I started, I reached out to a handful of convivial writers and editors. Daniel Halpern, the publisher of Ecco Press, suggested that the Internet has obviated young writers’ need for companionship, gossip and consolation. Each of these people noted that the bookish crowd has largely dispersed into Brooklyn, where rents are cheaper. On my first night, I fortified myself with a cocktail at my favorite Manhattan bar, Jimmy’s Corner, a scruffy, boxing-themed joint tucked into a wrinkle in Times Square’s space-time continuum. (Mr. Literate Programming. Big data meets the Bard. ©Charles Williams Here’s some advice for bibliophiles with teetering piles of books and not enough hours in the day: don’t read them.
Instead, feed the books into a computer program and make graphs, maps and charts: it is the best way to get to grips with the vastness of literature. That, at least, is the recommendation of Franco Moretti, a 63-year-old professor of English at Stanford University and unofficial leader of a band of academics bringing a science-fiction thrill to the science of fiction. For centuries, the basic task of literary scholarship has been close reading of texts. But for digitally savvy academics such as Moretti, literary study doesn’t always require scholars actually to read books. Who, for example, would have guessed that, according to a 2011 Harvard study of four per cent (that is, five million) of all the books printed in English, less than half the number of words used are included in dictionaries, the rest being “lexical dark matter”?
Data map. Books & Literature. Bookforum.com / home. Lapham’s Quarterly. Utopia Logos. Utopia is usually considered a dirty word. The concept has been too often been employed to justify the worst totalitarian terror and justify passivity in the face of actual political issues. Rarely is utopia understood as a regulative ideal that resists translation into practice yet remains necessary to guide any genuine attempt at liberation. It instead conjures up images of demagogues, dreamers, fanatics, apocalypse, gullibility, and – perhaps above all — what Samuel Butler, the great Victorian satirist, called “erehwon” (or “nowhere” spelled backwards).
But this is only part of the story. Utopia has an anthropological appeal, especially for the lowly and the insulted, and Ernst Bloch was surely right when he noted in Heritage of Our Times (1935) that “man does not live by bread alone – especially when he doesn’t have any.” Envisioning utopia requires boldness of the imagination coupled with a deep knowledge of the past and its cultural heritage. Page-Turner. April 8, 2014 Slide Show: Kurt Vonnegut’s Whimsical Drawings Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.,’s crude, ludic doodles—a beaver, a cobra, an asterisk-anus—are famous from novels like “Breakfast of Champions,” as is the curly-haired self-portrait that doubled as his signature. But making graphic art was, for Vonnegut, a hobby that extended beyond illustrations for his fiction: he painted seascapes and landscapes on Cape Cod in the nineteen-fifties; felt-tip drawings of abstract faces on discarded pages of manuscripts; and larger, more formal color drawings that he exhibited in a one-man show in Greenwich Village in 1980.
Vonnegut described his artwork as a pursuit that liberated him from the oppressive work of writing. In “Fates Worse Than Death,” he wrote, “My own means of making a living is essentially clerical, and hence tedious and constipating.… The making of pictures is to writing what laughing gas is to the Asian influenza.”...Continue Reading >> What Muriel Spark Saw She loved lightning. Dashboard? More Like Bookshelf: Your Guide to Literary Tumblrs.
By Nick Moran posted at 6:00 am on February 3, 2012 96 [Ed Note: Don't miss Part Two and Part Three!] About two months ago, The Millions joined the Tumblr community. So far, the going has been great. The platform is perfectly suited for dynamic storytelling, and as a direct result, it is home to some of the friendliest book lovers around. For convenience, I’ve broken this list up among several categories, but I haven’t put these in any preferential order. 1. Awesome People Reading: Where to see what famous people read.Cover Spy: Where to see what MTA passengers read.Lisa Simpson Book Club: Where to see what Lisa Simpson reads.Bookshelf Porn: The SFW (despite its title) spot to ogle bookshelves.Slaughterhouse 90210: The middle of the television/literature Venn diagram.The Art of Google Books: Who’s scanning those books? 2. The Los Angeles Review of Books: Rapidly increasing L.A.’s literary cachet.The New Inquiry: The Times can look down its nose all it wants. 3. 4. 5.
A. 6. W. 7. 8. The Great Taxonomy of Literary Tumblrs: Round Two. By Nick Moran posted at 6:00 am on August 7, 2012 40 [Ed Note: Don't miss Part One and Part Three!] Six months ago, I rounded up a list of my favorite literary Tumblr accounts. Half a year later, I’m pleased to see those blogs still going strong. I’m also pleased to see that a pile of the names on my Wish List came around to the land of likes and reblogs. In that regard, some shout outs are in order: Picador Book Room (and its “Sunday Sontags”) has become a favorite of The Millions’ social media team; The Strand made its way onto the blogging platform and we’re all better because of it; Poetry Magazine continues to draw from its enviable archives to bring some really exciting content to our Dashboard; and — whether it’s due to my friendly dig or their own volition — The Paris Review’s presence has been especially awesome of late.
So with all of that in mind, I’ve decided it’s time for another list — a better list, a bigger list. 0. The Millions: duh! 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Public Books — A curated monthly review devoted to spirited debate about books and the arts. The 25 Best Websites for Literature Lovers. It’s an interesting relationship that book lovers have with the Internet: most would rather read a physical book than something on an iPad or Kindle, and even though an Amazon purchase is just two or three clicks away, dedicated readers would rather take a trip to their local indie bookstore.
Yet the literary world occupies a decent-sized space on the web. Readers, writers, publishers, editors, and everybody in between are tweeting, Tumbling, blogging, and probably even Vine-ing about their favorite books. In case the demise of Google Reader threw your literary Internet browsing into a dark void, here’s a list of 25 book sites to bookmark.
The Millions Ten years is a mighty long time in terms of Internet life, but that’s how long The Millions has been kicking out a steady stream of reviews, essays, and links. Buffalo Buffalo. The sentence's meaning becomes clearer when it's understood that it uses three meanings of the word buffalo: the city of Buffalo, New York, the somewhat uncommon verb "to buffalo" (meaning "to bully or intimidate"), as well as the animal buffalo. When the punctuation and grammar are expanded, the sentence could read as follows: "Buffalo buffalo that Buffalo buffalo buffalo, buffalo Buffalo buffalo. " The meaning becomes even clearer when synonyms are used: "Buffalo bison that other Buffalo bison bully, themselves bully Buffalo bison.
" Sentence construction Bison engaged in a contest of dominance. This sentence supposes they have a history of such bullying with other buffalo, and they are from upstate New York. A comic explaining the concept The sentence is unpunctuated and uses three different readings of the word "buffalo". Marking each "buffalo" with its use as shown above gives: Buffaloa buffalon Buffaloa buffalon buffalov buffalov Buffaloa buffalon. Usage Other words using the same pattern. ELI5: Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. : explainlikeimfive. Garden path sentence. According to one current psycholinguistic theory, as a person reads a garden path sentence, the reader builds up a structure of meaning one word at a time. At some point, it becomes clear to the reader that the next word or phrase cannot be incorporated into the structure built up thus far; it is inconsistent with the path down which they have been led. Garden path sentences are less common in spoken communication because the prosodic qualities of speech (such as the stress and the tone of voice) often serve to resolve ambiguities in the written text.
This phenomenon is discussed at length by Stanley Fish in his book Surprised by Sin. He argues that incremental parsing of sentences needs to be addressed by literary theorists. He also covers this topic in several essays from his book Is there a text in this Class?. Examples[edit] Garden path sentences can be either simple or complex. Simple[edit] A second phrase can cause the reinterpretation of meaning (see paraprosdokian): Complex[edit] The History of the English Language in Ten Animated Minutes. On Language - Crash Blossoms. Y'all. Y’all (/jɔːl/ yawl) is a contraction of the words "you" and "all". It is used as a plural second-person pronoun. Commonly believed to have originated in the Southern United States, it is primarily associated with Southern American English, African-American Vernacular English, and some dialects of the Western United States.[2] It is also found in the English-speaking islands of the West Indies as well as in the Canadian province of Alberta.
Usage[edit] Frequency of either "Y’all" or "You all" to address multiple people, according to an Internet survey of American dialect variation.[3] Second-person singular usage[edit] There is long-standing disagreement about whether y’all can have primarily singular reference. H. Is a cardinal article of faith in the South. ... The use of "y'all" as the dominant second person-plural pronoun is not necessarily universal in the Southern United States. Possessive usage[edit] There is no standard way of forming the written possessive form of y’all. Bated breath. Thomas Browne, 17th-Century Author, Draws New Interest. The handful of books and tracts in which these words first appeared was even more remarkable than the coinages, a body of work as strange and unclassifiable as any in English literature. That this doctor’s name — Thomas Browne — no longer keeps company, at least in America, with those of Shakespeare, Chaucer and other architects of the language would have come as a great disappointment to a multitude of other authors who revered Browne and passed his writings along, generation to generation, like a kind of formula for the philosopher’s stone.
Coleridge numbered him among his “first favourites.” Emily Dickinson kept an edition of Browne at her bedside. Melville, whose style was deeply indebted to him, called him a “crack’d Archangel.” Virginia Woolf said he paved the way for all psychological novelists, and Borges, who translated him, once described himself as just another word for Browne (and for Kafka and Chesterton).
He and Ms. Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar. A man may have no bad habits and have worse. When in doubt, tell the truth. It is more trouble to make a maxim than it is to do right. A dozen direct censures are easier to bear than one morganatic compliment. Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.
He was as shy as a newspaper is when referring to its own merits. Truth is the most valuable thing we have. It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress. It is your human environment that makes climate. Everything human is pathetic. We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it -- and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. There are those who scoff at the schoolboy, calling him frivolous and shallow. The timid man yearns for full value and demands a tenth. Truth is stranger than fiction -- to some people, but I am measurably familiar with it. KnowWords. Reading, Writing, Vocabulary. The Big Read. Reading Fast and Slow. Article - Spring 2012 Print The speed at which our eyes travel across the printed page has serious (and surprising) implications for the way we make sense of words Amy Carter and Jimmy Carter taking a speed reading course at the White House By Jessica Love In 1986, an Italian journalist named Carlo Petrini became so outraged by the sight of a fast-food restaurant near Rome’s Spanish Steps that he ended up spawning a movement.
Should we be surprised that a Slow Reading movement has emerged as well? So exactly what happens when we read at a gallop? But first, the mechanics. Thus, with each fixation we glean information from about 20 letters. Decoding begins quickly, within 60 milliseconds of landing. During a hop, known as a saccade, we are unable to perceive any letters at all. So where do speed-readers fit into all of this? There may be people whose eyes really can reach 2,500 words per minute, and reputable psychologists just haven’t tracked them down yet. 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.” In her recent study On Rereading Patricia Meyers Spacks uses McMurtry as an example of someone who rereads to stubbornly avoid novelty, and unapologetically so. Spacks herself feels slightly differently. Yet there are far more positive spins put on rereading in Spacks’s book and elsewhere. Rereading is also a form of pedagogy. Vivian Gornick’s essay in Fadiman’s collection also deals with lost love. Not well, is the short answer. List of countries by literacy rate. World map indicating literacy by country in 2011 (2011 UN Human Development Report and Individual statistics departments) Grey = no data This is a list of countries by literacy rate. The figures represent a mixture of data collected by the CIA World Factbook,[1] and national self-reported data. Where data was unavailable older figures were used. For highly developed/high income countries where literacy statistics were not collected, a rate of 99% was assumed.
List[edit] According to the CIA World Factbook, almost 75% of the world's 775 million illiterate adults are concentrated in ten countries (in descending order: India, China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Egypt, Brazil, Indonesia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo). See also[edit] References[edit] Literary Iceland Revels In Its Annual 'Christmas Book Flood' eBooks. The Frankenstein Universe: How The New York Public Library Blew Up the Ebook. Words About Words: 5 Essential Books on Language. Top 10 Literary References in Archer. Book Reviewers for Hire Meet a Demand for Online Raves. 25 Best Literary Criticism Blogs | MastersDegree.net. Joe Queenan: My 6,128 Favorite Books. A Short Defense of Literary Excess. Rise of the Neuronovel. The Paperback Quest for Joy by Laura Vanderkam, City Journal Autumn 2012. 4 Sites with LOTS Of Completely Free Ebooks That Don’t Suck.
THE BRITISH LIBRARY - The world's knowledge. World Digital Library Home. National Libraries. Readability. Authorama - Public Domain Books. Findings - Popular. Digital Scriptorium. Behold, the Kindle of the 16th Century - Megan Garber. Meanderings of Memory: An Oxford English Dictionary Mystery. The Public Domain Review | Online journal dedicated to showcasing the most interesting and unusual out-of-copyright works available on the web.
The Storyteller. David Ferry's Beautiful Thefts. Book Exchange 2013. Project Guttenberg Vocabulary Analysis. On the business of literature. Com: THE NOVEL IS A BOAT. Expositions: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities, ethics issue. Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind. 19 Awesomely Designed Books From 2013 That Prove Print Isn’t Dead. Louis Menand: Paul de Man’s Hidden Past.
Books. Writers. Writing. Hypertexts. Free Online Literature and Study Guides. Books Should Be Free. Welcome to BookCrossing. FullBooks.com - Thousands of Full-Text Free Books - StumbleUpon. Read Online | Sacred Economics | Charles Eisenstein. Emotional Economics. Penn State University's Electronic Classics Series Site: Download Great Literary Works in PDF Penn State's Electronic Classics Series Site. The Victorian Literary Studies Archive, Hyper-Concordance, Concordance, ƒRƒ“ƒR[ƒ_ƒ“ƒX, ƒnƒCƒp[EƒRƒ“ƒR[ƒ_ƒ“ƒX, Concordances, concordance, concordances, Nagoya University, Japan. Free Science Fiction Classics on the Web: Huxley, Orwell, Asimov, Gaiman & Beyond.
Articles and essays. 102 Spectacular Nonfiction Stories from 2012 | Byliner Anthologies. Quotidiana. Articles & Essays. Byliner. The Best Magazine Articles Ever. Essays. The new yorker archive. Sequences. 3quarksdaily. N+1.