"After spending the past few years teasing its literary ambitions and acquiring the audiobook platform Findaway for $119 million, Spotify has formally launched its audiobooks business as an à la carte model that will allow users to purchase and download individual audiobooks." - The Hollywood Reporter
“This is a concerted, organized, well-resourced push at censorship,” said Suzanne Nossel, the chief executive of PEN America. The effort, she said, “is ideologically motivated and politically expedient, and it needs to be understood as such in order to be confronted and addressed properly.” - The New York Times
So does every other country's belief in its war history, of course. "Versions told by autocrats and family men trample diary entries and letters. Stories, or rather silences, around the Siege have haunted Leningrad-native Barskova her entire life." - LitHub
Gayl Jones and Jamil Jan Kochai are the only established names on a list that includes two filmmakers and several books of short stories - and that leaves off some expected nominees like Yiyun Li, Lydia Millet, and Andrew Sean Greer. - Washington Post (AP)
"I’m sometimes asked about fiction I wrote 50 years ago and it’s cheering to know that for readers there is no time dimension. Books live in a form of the perpetual present." - The Guardian (UK)
"Once maligned as lowbrow, the genre has gained popularity over the past two decades" - perhaps because of social media and our hyper-aware lives. - The Atlantic
And so his English translator says now's the time for Perhat Turson's bleak novel finally to come out in English. "They deserve to have their voices and their work recognized," he says. - The New York Times
"Public libraries have been threatened by politicians and community members with a loss of funding for their refusal to remove books. Members of the Proud Boys, an extremist right-wing group, showed up at a school board meeting. ... Librarians have been accused of promoting pedophilia." - The New York Times
How do the people making up the Ilona Andrews brand do it? Gordon Andrews: "We have argued about the fate of certain characters. Who lives, who dies." (Ilona agrees.) - The New York Times
"I wrote a biography of the man that was largely glowing. Football heroics, overcoming obstacles, practical joker, etc. And, looking at it now, if I’m being brutally honest—I’d advise people not to read it. He’s a bad guy. He doesn’t deserve the icon treatment. He doesn’t deserve acclaim." - Poynter
"Where groomer has a pedigree as a legitimate term of opprobrium, ... miscegenation was invented out of whole cloth, intended as a bludgeon to preempt debate in a racist society where intermarriage was deemed an appalling notion, even among many white abolitionists." The election year: 1864. - Literary Hub
The English vocabulary is especially limited, with only 170,000 or so words in an English dictionary. What does this mean to the art writer trying to capture a brushstroke? You fall back on tried and true descriptors like lush, bold, tentative, delicate. - LitHub
“Funding and the politics of funding within the Australia Council is dominated by performing arts, the lion’s share of funds goes to performing arts bodies, and it is essentially a performing-arts grants body. It’s time it was recognised as such, and literature split from it.” - The Guardian
In a longread laid out like a choose-your-own-adventure tale, Leslie Jamison looks at why kids adore the books (agency!), their own origin story, how authors approach them, and the series's progeny (e.g., Neil Patrick Harris's Choose Your Own Autobiography or the choose-your-own-Macbeth-play Sleep No More). - The New Yorker
It "was meant as reference, but also to be savoured. The 11th edition of Britannica (1929) featured Cecil B. DeMille on motion pictures and J.B. Priestley on English literature. It was ‘plausible, reasonable, unruffled, often reserved and completely authoritative’. And sometimes plain wrong. - The Spectator
