The Guardian
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Three Little Words.
Exciting news for poets everywhere! Northumberland’s Northern Poetry Library is piloting a new poetic form called the anchored terset. The Guardian reports: “The anchored terset strips poetry down to the bones, consisting of four lines, three words and just one…
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Fan Fiction
When two fans tweeted Florence Welch (of the indie rock band Florence + the Machine) about starting a book club, they never imagined she’d say yes. The Guardian explains the story behind the fan-inspired book club, Between Two Books. “It’s…
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Switching Languages
At the Guardian, Jhumpa Lahiri recounts the path that led her to write her latest book in Italian, though she is a non-native speaker: A week after arriving [in Rome], I open my diary to describe our misadventures and I…
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Like Thoreau, But Not
Writers for generation have sought out the solitude of the wilderness to get their work done. But sometimes it’s not as romantic as we hope.
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Oxford Dictionary to Review Sexist Sentences
A Twitter storm over sexism within the Oxford Dictionary has lead its publisher, Oxford University Press, to reconsider how it selects example sentences, reports the Guardian. The dictionary includes sentences to explain usage of words, but researchers found that the book…
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The Power of Amazon
How much of the world has Amazon taken over? The Guardian talks with University Book Store and Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, two independent bookstores, the former located less than a mile away from Amazon Books: …manager Tracy Taylor pointed out that…
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A Tale as Old as Time
Fairytales are some of the oldest stories we know, and as it turns out, they might be even older than we thought. The Guardian looks into the mysterious origins of stories like Rumplestiltskin and Beauty and the Beast.
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The Twin Paradox
By running two lives that started from the same point off along divergent tracks, they throw up questions about our uniqueness, and the chances and choices that make us who we are. From Shakespeare to Stephen King, identical twins have played…
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What If I Have No Person?
The Guardian’s Hermione Hoby interviews Joyce Carol Oates about her upcoming novel, The Man Without a Shadow, also touching on everything from her impossible back catalog to her Twitter we all love to hate.
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Indie Presses Become Gatekeepers
Big publishers traditionally rely on income from known authors to support taking risks on new writers. But those publishers have grown more risk-averse, avoiding unknown writers and focusing on mainstream books expected to perform well in the marketplace. Meanwhile, independent publishers are filling the…
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The Title Contains a Question
Blackness in the white imagination has nothing to do with black people. The Guardian’s Kate Kellaway interviews Claudia Rankine on the writing of Citizen, some of her other work, and her thoughts on racism—and of course, Rankine, as always, is…
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Poetry As Propaganda
Oxford academic Elisabeth Kendall has found that poetry may be a major recruitment tool for militant jihadis in the Middle East. Although poetry is often sidelined in Western cultures, it is still important in Arab-speaking nations, where a reality TV show…