May 2012
10 posts
25 words that English NEEDS →
LOVE. Foreign words for which there is no sufficient translation in English, including my faves “pena ajena,” Spanish for feeling embarrasment on behalf of someone else, and “l’esprit de l’escalier,” or thinking of a comeback after you’ve left the situation.
April 2012
3 posts
March 2012
13 posts
Roald Dahl writes back to fans →
Best Translated Book Award longlist →
The advice I give my students is the same advice I give myself—forget...
– Marilynne Robinson, “Reclaiming a Sense of the Sacred”, The Chronicle of Higher Education
1 tag
Seattle bookseller David Ishii dies →
February 2012
4 posts
3 tags
The best people in any field are those who devote the most hours to what the...
– Geoffrey Colvin, senior editor-at-large, Fortune quoted in Sage Cohen’s The Productive Writer
Colombian artist Johanna Calle →
She hand-draws ledgers with distortions. The effect is amazing. Wouldn’t these make great Kafka covers?
January 2012
17 posts
…recognize that the art of writing is immensely more difficult than the...
– John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist
It’s having no children, living away from friends, failing to write well,...
– Virginia Woolf.
Celebrities: they’re just like us.
There are two sorts of happiness: the happiness of the virtuous and the...
– Leo Tolstoy
Distraction-free word processing →
December 2011
26 posts