The other day, meeting with a publicist from a scholarly publishing house, I asked her a question: Does the press she works for think about the gender breakdown of its authors? I asked because I often do an informal VIDA-style count of the number of male and female authors represented in book catalogs. I do… Continue reading »
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When Dictionaries Move Online
…surprising things happen. For instance, lexicographers can track word lookups and peg them to news. A celebrity death or political debate now becomes a “vocabulary event.” I spent the last few weeks talking to lexicographers about how dictionary-making changes when it goes digital (“In the Digital Era, Our Dictionaries Read Us“). For dictionary makers, going… Continue reading »
The Nine Lives (and Deaths) of the Short Story
Never has a literary genre been more zombified than the short story. It’s dead! It’s alive! Dead, alive! Here are the latest conflicting diagnoses: The New York Times’s Leslie Kaufman says that short stories are alive and kicking, souped up by digital delivery (“A Good Fit for Today’s Little Screens: Short Stories,” Feb. 15, 2013):… Continue reading »
A Very Brief Rant About Verbing
Rage, rage against the verbing of the noun (and the adjective). I’m sorry to have to tell you that at a recent publishers’ confab I heard speakers talk about “solutioning” and “obsoleting.” “Innovate” as a transitive verb is bad enough. (The dictionary says it’s okay, and I’m not going to argue with the dictionary.) But… Continue reading »
“You Can’t Do That With an Ebook”
We spend a lot of time at our local public library, which happens to be the D.C. Public Library’s Southeast branch, near Eastern Market. We check out books, of course–armfuls of them, because my offspring don’t believe in the one-book-at-a-time approach to reading. We also like to drop by the used-book sale the library has… Continue reading »
