ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

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Charge: Today’s Literary Magazines Engage In Widespread Censorship

Today’s culture of censorship and censure in literary magazines is stifling writers’ careers at their most vulnerable stage. Our experience at Crab Creek Review offers a case in point and a warning. - Persuasion

This Year’s Booker Prize Shortlist

Five of the six-strong shortlist are women, with authors from five countries represented, including the Netherlands for the first time. - BBC

Somehow, Gillian Anderson Isn’t Tired Of Talking, Or Writing, About Sex

The actor “has become a curator, rather than an object, of sexual fantasies. Want, a new book released next week, is a collection of anonymous fantasies written by women from all over the world, selected and introduced by Anderson.” But - not to make a pun - why would she want to do this? - Slate

We Need More, And Better, Depictions Of Old People In Books

And not 40-year-olds, y’all. “Truly older characters remain very rare in literature, with around only two to three percent of protagonists aged eighty or above. … highlights a gap in representation for our aging population, but also underscores the attributes that society deems worthy of fiction.” - LitHub

Found In The Archives, A Novel By Horror Master George A. Romero Sees The Light Of Day

Romero, of course, is known as a director - his most famous movie being Night of the Living Dead. But an archivist working on Romero’s papers “found the manuscript of a sprawling supernatural novel — one Romero had clearly worked on extensively, and apparently in secret.” - The New York Times

Salman Rushdie, Anne Carson, Rachel Kushner Make National Book Award Longlists

Some of the fiction nominees are also on the Booker Prize Longlist, but this list adds many others, including short story collections, as well. - Washington Post (MSN)

Today’s Great Contemporary Literature Is About The Past

Over the last several decades, a quiet revolution has taken place in American fiction: The novels recognized by major literary prizes have largely abandoned the present in favor of the past. Contemporary fiction has never been less contemporary. - The Nation

Just Like The Old Days: Russian Books That Would Be Banned At Home Are Being Smuggled Abroad For Publication

"The StraightForward Foundation ... acts like a pro bono literary agency. It connects Russian authors, writing about sensitive topics, to publishers abroad, who publish their work in different languages. The foundation only requires that the authors agree to post the Russian versions of their manuscripts online for free for readers back home." - NPR

Florida School District Must Restore Banned Books To School Libraries

Under a settlement agreement, the School Board of Nassau County (along the border with Georgia, about 35 miles northeast of Jacksonville) must restore access to 36 titles with LGBTQ content which it had ordered removed. The authors of one of those books were plaintiffs. - AP

The Internet Archive Court Loss Traps Libraries In Untenable Position

This decision harms libraries. It locks them into an e-book ecosystem designed to extract as much money as possible while harvesting (and reselling) reader data en masse. It leaves local communities’ reading habits at the mercy of curatorial decisions made by four dominant publishing companies thousands of miles away. - MIT Technology Review

NaNoWriMo Suggested Using AI To Write Novels, And Actual Novelists Are Furious

The organization argued that AI helps disabled or marginalized writers who don't have industry connections. As one of many now-former members put it, "It’s pretty insulting to imply that the only way members of marginalized communities can get their foot in the door is through the use of a plagiarism machine." - Slate (MSN)

How Do You Make An Audiobook Out Of A Graphic Novel?

Often the adaptation is in the style of a radio play, with sound design providing context for the original's dialogue. Sometimes the original visuals are replaced with newly-written narration. dialogue read by actors. In any case, a job which seemed near-impossible to audio publishers 20 years ago is becoming commonplace. - Publishers Weekly

Can Gen Z Save Wikipedia From AI And Chatbots?

As Wikipedia’s visibility diminishes, reduced to mere training data for AI applications, it also loses prominence in the minds of readers and potential contributors. - The Guardian

Self Therapy Is Killing The Memoir

In certain bodies, to write about yourself at all is already to be pathologized. But there’s a difference between creative work conferring self-knowledge on a par with psychiatric insight and structuring that work to shore up the psychiatric diagnosis or breakthrough. - The Walrus

We May Soon Recover Lost Texts Lost For Millenia. They Could Change How We Understand History

The problem is more complex than the fact that many texts were lost to the annals of history. Most people just see the most recent translation of the Iliad or works of Cicero on the shelf at a bookstore, and assume that these texts have been handed down in a fairly predictable way generation after generation. - Works in Progress

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