“Firefighters drilled through the wall of a building behind the structure and entering for minutes at a time, strapped the bookcases together and hauled them backwards to reach the books.” - The Guardian (UK)
During my own editing stint, I came to understand writers as prisoners of their own minds, pressed up against the bars of the words they have already committed to the page. Writers suffer from a cognitive impairment that limits their ability to see flaws in their prose. - The Atlantic
House Resolution 7661 transforms grassroots library battles into national policy, giving censors sweeping powers to purge school and public collections. Democracy's reading rooms become political battlegrounds as cultural wars scale up. — Literary Hub
Literary writers have other demands to satisfy. In general, readers come to their books seeking not an escape from reality but perspective on it. Romance novels can provide this, just as literary novels can have happy endings, but they’re still beholden to the fantasy that’s part of the genre. - The Atlantic
If the review sections of newspapers are closing down, there’s a sense that this moment could make room for a meatier, weirder kind of criticism. - Columbia Journalism Review
At a St. Petersburg bookstore, Lauren Peace, an enterprise equity reporter at the Tampa Bay Times, moderates conversations about a selected story among its author and community members. The idea is not just to discuss the story’s substance, but to give readers a behind-the-scenes look at the reporting process and decision-making. - Nieman Lab
A correspondent tries a method designed by professors of cognition to mirror language-learning in the real world. The tasks basically simulate how we would cope if dropped into a foreign country with an unknown language, simply using our innate skills to start making sense of the mysterious sounds made by everyone around us. - BBC
“They had that democratic aspect to them where you can just find them anywhere and it always felt like it was the pick ’n’ mix candy-type store where there is something here for everyone, whether it’s the Harlequin romance novel or something very pulpy like a sci-fi or horror novel that you could quickly get.” - The Guardian
“The Tamizdat Project is the brainchild of Yakov Klots, a soft-spoken, unassuming literary scholar who teaches at Hunter College. He chose the name from a Russian word meaning ‘published abroad,’ which, along with samizdat (‘to self-publish’), was one of the two main methods of evading Soviet book censorship.” - The New York Times
As reading is increasingly tracked and performed online, there is a growing sense that a solitary pleasure is being reshaped by the logic of metrics and visibility. - The Guardian
The advent of the chatbot raised an unsettling question: What if writing didn’t have to be hard? What if that noble ordeal was no more necessary than going to a well to fetch your water when you could just turn on a tap? - The Atlantic
“The strictly disenchanted world, where nothing exists but physical processes describable without metaphor, and even consciousness is just a material problem waiting to be solved, can be a desiccated place. It keeps heart and mind on inadequate rations.” - The Guardian (UK)
“Fiction has no obligation to dispel ambiguity. It can make use of it—even intensify it—in order to evoke and transform experience. In Beloved, Morrison does take possession of the master’s tools, but she bends them, breaks them, and then uses them to reshape the house.” - LitHub
With the Taliban having outlawed the education of girls and severely restricted women’s other rights, a clandestine group of women gather weekly to read books ranging from Orwell and Hemingway to contemporary Iranian fiction. - The Guardian
