A community — comprised of proud readers, book stores, libraries, publishing houses, and more — has become an online safe haven for bibliophiles. The content has been considered beautiful and engaging, but the photos and captions work to inspire others to pick up a book in an increasingly digital era.
Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of the Nobel prize in literature 2017 Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian
Kazuo Ishiguro’s new book features an American woman who claims to be a virtuoso on the cello. She befriends and tutors a young Hungarian cellist earning his living playing in cafes. she tells him “you have it, most definitely you have … potential.” As the days turn into weeks, he wonders why she does not appear to own a cello herself, and eventually, as summer draws to a close, he discovers why. She cannot actually play the instrument at all. So convinced was she of her own musical genius, no teacher ever seemed equal to it, and so rather than tarnish her gift with imperfection, she chose never to realize it at all. “At least I haven’t damaged what I was born with,” she says.
Ishiguro’s fiction is acclaimed for the spare elegance of the writing, a testament to the power of what is left unsaid.
Kazuo was born in Japan, but moved with his parents and two sisters to Surrey when he was five, and has lived here ever since. His parents found British culture quite bewildering, and Ishiguro was inevitably cast in the role of anthropological go-between, but this left him with a fascination with the minutiae of class rather than any wound of dislocation
The study found that “motherF………” was used 678 times more often in the mid-2000s than the early 1950s, occurrences of “s..t” multiplied 69 times, and “f..k” was 168 times more frequent.
Led by Jean Twenge, author and psychology professor at San Diego State University, the team analysed the titles making up the Google Books corpus of American English books published between 1950 and 2008, looking for uses of the words “s..t”, “”, “f..k”, “c..t”, “c……r”, “motherfr”, and other curse words”.
Overall, they found that writers were “significantly more likely to use swearwords in the years since 1950”, with books published in 2005-2008 28 times more likely to include swearwords than books published in the early 1950s. The paper that was publishefd“American culture increasingly values individual self-expression and weaker social taboos, and these trends are manifested in the increasing use of swearwords.”
Twenge and her fellow authors, graduate student Hannah Van Landingham and University of Georgia psychology professor W Keith Campbell, link the rise of profanities in US literature to the increasingly individualistic nature of the country’s culture, as well as the relaxation of societal taboos.
April 1st, 2017, bibliophiles, book artists, and food lovers around the world gather to celebrate the book arts where participants create an “edible book,” which can be inspired by a favorite tale, involve a pun on a famous title, or simply be in the shape of a book (or scroll, or tablet, etc). All entries will be exhibited, documented, then EATEN! Photographs of all edible books will appear in the Edible Book Festival gallery.
The Champaign-Urbana Edible Book Festival is sponsored by the University Library and Common Ground Coop, and supported by the generous help of campus and community volunteers and prize donors.
| Catcher in the Rye, by Cathy Blake and Craig Evans |
Alice in Wonderland
Created by Shilpi Saxena
Flower Ball
Created by Jen-chien Yu and Adelaide Kota
Smell sampling equipment on Ihesus: The Floure of the Commaundementes of God, printed in London by Wyken de Worde (1521) at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York (photo by Christine Nelson)
Carlos Benaim, master perfumer from International Flavors and Fragrances smelling one of J. P. Morgan’s Pedro Murias Cuban cigars (photo by Christine Nelson)
The sampling equipment on a leather-bound copy of The Golden Legend, printed in London by Wyken de Worde (1521) (photo by Christine Nelson)
8. You Are Having a Good Time, by Amie Barrodale
It’s fascinating to watch people do awful things to each other, especially when you can’t quite tell why they’re doing them, and neither can they. In this debut collection of stories, Barrodale senses that muddle is more common than motive. As one of her less-explosive failures puts it, “We are people who never get it right.”
Sweet Lamb of Heaven, by Lydia Millet
A paranoid thriller about a mother and daughter in flight from a sociopath husband, the novel is a frightening performance of vertigo. Millet delivers a narrator growing aware of her own unreliability
“The North Water…is a great white shark of a book ― swift, terrifying, relentless and unstoppable.” … A nineteenth-century whaling ship sets sail for the Arctic with a killer aboard in this dark, sharp, and highly original .
The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
The audacious new novel about family and ambition from “one of the best living mystery writers” (Grantland) and bestselling, award-winning author of The Fever, Megan Abbott.
3. Private Citizens, by Tony Tulathimutte
It’s a rare and bracing thing to see a debut novelist confident enough to pour acid on an entire system (in this case, the one we call meritocracy). The millennials have teeth.
