"The coffee shop chain has said the 2021 awards, which were announced in February this year, were the last. ... The awards were established in 1971 and known as the Whitbread book awards until 2005, when Costa took over the running and financing. Whitbread sold Costa to Coca-Cola in 2019." - The Guardian
"'Charlie Roberts' and 'Only Stand and Wait' were both published on 9 June in Strand magazine, a US-based print magazine that publishes short fiction and interviews. ... A previously unpublished story, 'Adventure on a Bad Night', was published by Strand magazine in 2020." - The Guardian
"My Comrade was a drag scene zine that documented the East Village demimonde from 1987 to 1994. In its sporadic 13 issues, drag royalty rubbed shoulders with go-go boys, nightclub denizens, art stars, and assorted riffraff and glamour-pusses." And it returns this month. - Artnet
"Following the pandemic and amid escalating global tensions as well as environmental concerns, Christian publishers say they are acquiring more books now than in years past on how to live faithfully in the present and properly prepare for (the Rapture, Armageddon, and other) End Times events." - Publishers Weekly
It was quite the literary drama: Customs in Bombay had impounded the first shipment of Nabokov's novel, the ministers of justice and finance were involved, and back then (1959) there was no Censor Board. So Jawaharlal Nehru himself read the book and rendered his decision. - Scroll (India)
How to reproduce online the serendipity of walking into a bookstore and discovering new books and authors. A new app, Tertulia, launched this week, is trying a different approach, by measuring and distilling the online chatter about books to point readers to the ones that are driving discussions. - The New York Times
To be meta was to flex your self-awareness for social currency, to demonstrate proficiency in the language of smirky dissociative irony that was the trendy cultural refuge from the massive information shitstorm. - The Atlantic
If, in fact, book reviews are on the whole too positive, as some suggest, does this mean that the purpose of book reviewing is to sniff out what’s rotten? Or, if book reviews are too negative, does this mean that public-facing literary criticism’s purpose is to highlight what’s worth reading? - LA Review of Books
"Her desire for procedural accuracy and the developments in criminology and medicolegal sciences her writing tracks show clearly the progression of forensics into the field of study it now is." - CrimeReads
First introduced in January 2021, the Maryland e-book law required any publisher offering to license "an electronic literary product" to consumers in the state to also offer to license the content to public libraries "on reasonable terms." - Publishers Weekly
Obscure backlist titles are being thrust into the spotlight, generating sales of hundreds of thousands of copies. Every chain bookstore now prominently displays BookTok titles, pushing Oprah’s selections back to the next table. - Publishers Weekly
“We engage wealth as a journalistic subject. Tom Wolfe called it ‘plutography.’ At the T&C offices, we call it our ‘crazy money’ stories. - New York Magazine
Writers are indeed an incestuous little bunch eternally doomed to borrow, copy, steal, plagiarize, allude to, accidentally repeat, consciously imitate, alternately praise and denigrate each other’s work. Originality held aloft by its own purity in some Platonic realm . . . no, it doesn’t exist. - The Smart Set
If, in fact, book reviews are on the whole too positive, as some suggest, does this mean that the purpose of book reviewing is to sniff out what’s rotten? Or, if book reviews are too negative, does this mean that public-facing literary criticism’s purpose is to highlight what’s worth reading? - LA Review of Books
The growth of British literary festivals over the past few decades has been an exponential development. It has also changed the idea of what people expect from authors. - The Critic
