“-Ism” Is Word of the Year, Jane Austen’s Birthday, and More

by
Staff
12.16.15

Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today's stories:

Merriam-Webster has named the suffix “-ism” as its 2015 Word of the Year—which is not technically a word; it’s a morpheme. This decision follows Oxford Dictionaries’ choice last month to name an emoji as their word of the year. Merriam-Webster explained its choice of the suffix “because a small group of words that share this three-letter ending triggered both high volume and significant year-over-year increase in lookups at Merriam-Webster.com.” Those words included “racism,” “fascism,” and “socialism.” (Los Angeles Times)

“Write an essay. Win a movie theater.” Sound good? The owner of a restored movie theater in Maine is holding an essay contest in which the winner receives ownership of his restored, two-screen, first-run cinema. (New York Times)

The Wall Street Journal looks ahead to 2016 and the many upcoming festivals, book releases, plays, and films that will mark the four hundredth anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death.

Happy 240th birthday, Jane Austen! To mark the occasion, members of the Jane Austen Society of North America review interesting highlights of the novelist’s life and literary influence. (Biography.com)

“My Struggle is kind of a midlife-crisis novel, isn’t it?” Karl Ove Knausgaard talks about moving past the success of his multi-volume novel My Struggle at the Paris Review.

In an interview at the Rumpus, novelist Laurie Foos discusses the role of absurdity in literature, intersecting mythic and mundane elements in fiction, what makes a work feminist, and her latest novel, the Blue Girl.

At Longreads, several editors and writers including Leslie Jamison and Roxane Gay choose their favorite online essays and critical pieces of 2015.