"When we listen to audiobooks produced in the West, they have a Wakandan accent," said Eghosa Imasuen, executive director of Narrative Landscape Press in Lagos, Nigeria. "Nobody talks like that on the continent." - Publishers Weekly
“’The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher – August 6th 1983’ was published in The Guardian in 2014 and gave the title to Mantel’s collection of short stories that year. … Billed as a psychological thriller, the adaptation is by Alexandra Wood and will be directed by John Young at (Liverpool’s) Everyman Theatre in May.” - The Guardian
“Fans of the popular danmei same-sex romance genre, written and read mainly by straight women, say the Chinese government is carrying out the largest crackdown yet on it, effectively neutering the enjoyment. In the world of fantasy, danmei is relatively straightforward: Two men stand in for idealized relationships, from chaste to erotic.” - AP
In 1899, Charles Godfrey Leland published, with the help of Roma Lister, Aradia, or the gospel of the witches, which purported to record an ancient tradition of female-led sorcery in Italy. In the 1950s, “mother of Wicca” Doreen Valiente used the book to shape Wicca as it exists today. - The Public Domain Review
Bucknell University Press is on track to shut down by the end of this fiscal year. Demise of the press is raising broader questions about the future of university publishing as higher education institutions across the country face financial hardship and pressure to prove their return on investment to an increasingly skeptical public. - InsideHigherEd
According to their union, they are offered pay deals so dire that many of them work multiple jobs and live in substandard housing. Seventy-one per cent of respondents to a union survey find their salary insufficient to meet basic needs. - The Guardian
“With the (federal government) shutdown creating anxiety and uncertainty for those who depend on government aid, many independent bookstores took on a new role as hubs for food donations.” - The New York Times
Cowley’s power and influence lay in opening, not shutting, the door to a new generation. He came of age at an especially fertile literary moment, after World War I, and he had a special interest in the work of his contemporaries, in the homegrown modernism of Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway. - The Atlantic
There are The Farmer’s Almanac and The Old Farmer’s Almanac. Both are over 200 years old and both are annual publications known for their seasonal weather forecasts. The Farmer’s Almanac (founded in 1818) is the one closing; The Old Farmer’s Almanac (founded in 1792) “isn’t going anywhere.” - Nieman Lab
Communities are already feeling the impact: Some rural libraries in Florida and Mississippi, for example, have frozen interlibrary loan programs, sharply reducing the range of materials available to residents in more remote areas. - The New York Times
My husband and children knew what this meant. No one tried to compete with the Booker. Anytime after dinner, when there was a discussion about what movie to watch, no one asked me. Everybody knew what I would be doing. - The New York Times
“Szalay’s sixth work of fiction traces the life of one man, István, from his youth to midlife. The judges ‘had never read anything quite like it’, said panel chair Roddy Doyle, who won the prize in 1993. ‘It is, in many ways, a dark book, but it is a joy to read.’” - The Guardian
Academic critics read closely this year's Booker Prize finalists: Each novel has emotional temperature and structural ambition: domestic quietudes stretched into myth, migration histories turned intimate, masculinity stripped to bone, love sagas operating as cultural x-rays. A list that prizes atmosphere over spectacle. - The Conversation
We learn from stories. Our ancestors were raised on myths about their ancestors, tales about their saviours, emperors and lawgivers, and, eventually, novels about any number of times and places, most of them named. - Equator
