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
The site had lost $20 million in 2020, the last full year before the takeover, but deep cuts and new investments led by BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti turned things around. (Now, if only BuzzFeed can make itself profitable ...) - Axios
Researchers concluded that a humbling 90% of medieval manuscripts preserving chivalric and heroic narratives – those relating to King Arthur, for example – have gone. Of the stories themselves, about a third have been lost completely, meaning that no manuscript preserving them remains. - The Guardian
The subgenre has evolved and thrived for a century with its key elements mostly intact: galactic encyclopedias of knowledge, interstellar politics, heroic journeys, and extraterrestrial encounters. Space opera remains the engine of the genre, one of its most prominent forms. - LA Review of Books
"Both (Benjamín Labatut's) When We Cease to Understand the World and (Danielle Dutton's) Margaret The First blur their relationship with historical fact, shifting between essayistic writing and vivid flights of imagination, ... (a) delicate balancing act. Both also, interestingly, explore questions of philosophical and scientific truth." - Literary Hub
This time it's about video gaming. "While some expressions find obvious translations — 'pro-gamer' becomes 'joueur professionnel' — others seem a more strained, as 'streamer' is transformed into 'joueur-animateur en direct'." - Yahoo! (AFP)
"It is a voice of intelligent curiosity; it implies that the writer has synthesized a great deal of information; it confidently takes readers by the hand. ... It is an effective voice for a lot of long-form journalism, but it was not for the book I was trying to write." - Public Books
The CEO who has made Condé Nast profitable again: "We have about 70 million people who read our magazines, but we have 300 something million that interact with our websites every month and 450 million that interact with us on social media." - Nieman Lab
Translators "advocate for untranslated authors, bringing them to the attention of agents and editors. They act as de facto ambassadors for their authors, helping them navigate the press and social media — none of which, by the way, is compensated." So share their names, publishers. - The New York Times
Or rather, in French, about French. Bill 96 limits "access to public services in English and government powers to enforce compliance, despite objections from some of the province’s English speakers, Indigenous people and members of other linguistic minorities." - The New York Times
