How To Win A Literary Prize (Hint: It’s Rigged)
The game is rigged. It is rigged like capitalism is rigged. There is no puppet master, no conspiracy, only a field where advantages, to begin with, are distributed unequally. You can beat the long odds, but you have long odds to beat. - LA Review of Books
Outrage Spreads At An Author’s Faked Death And Recent Online Resurrection
After someone claiming to be the daughter of indie author Susan Meachen wrote that the author had died by suicide in 2020, her community split apart with finger-pointing - and also honored her with fundraisers. But, it turns out, her death was staged. - BBC
The Latest Chapter In The Saga Of The Italian Man Who Stole Unfinished Manuscripts From Famous Authors
Filippo Bernardini pleaded guilty in U.S. federal court last Friday, admitting he "had engaged in an elaborate email-impersonation scheme aimed at duping others in the industry into sharing unpublished book manuscripts." - Vulture
We Sometimes Forget How Words Evolve
Sentence structure aside, so much of the challenge posed by James’s prose is that words often had different meanings around the turn of the century than they do now. This quiet evolution of language is a facet that can be damnably hard to notice day to day, yet its importance is hard to overstate. - The New York Times
Discovered: Independent Written Record Of The Biblical King David
"The Mesha Stele ... is a basalt stone slab that has provided historians and linguists with the largest source of the Moabite language to date. Researchers have only now been able to verify with a considerable degree of certainty that the stele contains explicit references to King David." - The Jerusalem Post