Tobias Wolff reflects on his unfilled notebooks and wonders, "At what point do the tools of writing go from functional objects in their own right to signifiers that give the trappings of being a writer without ever having to sit down and write?" - LitHub
It was not exactly easy, but Brian Maracle "has figured out this improbable, but linguistically extremely smart, method of delivering this radically different language to adults." - The New York Times
From July to December 2022, PEN found 1,477 cases of books being removed, up from 1,149 during the previous six months. Since the organization began tracking bans in July 2021, it has counted more than 4,000 instances of book removals. - The New York Times
Since 2000, the use of English words has shot up by 773% according to data from Italy’s Treccani dictionary. There are now around 9,000 English words printed in the latest edition. - The New European
"Ernest Moret, a French foreign rights manager with Editions La Fabrique was stopped as he attempted to enter the UK at St. Pancras train station under the pretense that he may have 'engaged in terrorist acts.' The acts? Protesting efforts by the French government to raise the retirement age." - Literary Hub
"Going forward, BuzzFeed will concentrate its news efforts in a single profitable news organization — HuffPost, which it acquired from Verizon in 2020, per (CEO Jonah) Peretti's memo. The company's flagship BuzzFeed.com site will remain in place." - Variety
Public libraries—once as popular with libertarian autodidacts as leftists—have become targets of the Republican Party. Local-library systems, and local librarians, are being vilified nationwide as peddlers of Marxism and child pornography. - The New Yorker
"The American Prison Writing Archive … plans to increase the number of (its) digitized first-person accounts to more than 10,000, start a book series, launch exhibitions and create a kind of digital umbrella linking to kindred open-access efforts like the PEN America Prison and Justice Writing program." - The New York Times
"Research (has) found that a third of librarians had been asked by members of the public to censor or remove books, indicating that such incidences 'had increased significantly in recent years'. … The most targeted books involve empire, race and LGBTQ+ themes." - The Guardian
"We value small businesses, yet we give too much of our business to the large and the powerful," says the award-winning author, "and often, increasingly, we have hardly any choice. … (I don't) believe corporations should have as much control over our lives as they do." - The Guardian
The movement, under the banner of “the science of reading,” is targeting the education establishment: school districts, literacy gurus, publishers and colleges of education, which critics say have failed to embrace the cognitive science of how children learn to read. - The New York Times
"Trade body the Publishers Association found that sales were up 4% from 2021. In 2022, 669 million physical books were sold in the UK, the highest overall level ever recorded, … with a total income of £6.9 billion." - The Guardian
"The class of 2023 are the children of “terror and the war on terror,' of credit crunch and austerity, too young to have known 'the brief period of hope' after the cold war – a funny way of saying they’re not always very funny." - The Guardian (UK)
Agents and publishers might quail, but "a good story conveys a sense of more going on in the background, more to be discovered. We choose to return to them because something in them—honesty, clearsighted wisdom, a sense of humor, surprising turns of phrase, depth of character—lingers, expands." - LitHub
