In Joan Didion's essay about writing to find out what one thinks, she also wrote, "'The arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement.' This is a much stranger reason to write than to clarify an argument." - The Paris Review
Honestly, readers love them. "There’s something a little sexy about a well-executed negative review. ... A great pan does not just point out what’s missing from a book. It can fill those gaps with exhilarating, new conversations." - The Atlantic
Indie bookstores are positively booming - and they're more diverse than ever. This is a shock (a wonderful shock), considering that in the early days of the pandemic, "hundreds of small booksellers around the United States seemed doomed." - The New York Times
Many institutions have moved, or are on the verge of moving, significant portions of their collections off-site. Some are embarking on large-scale book de-accessioning projects, a process by which books are removed permanently from a collection. - The Walrus
The 1937 translation was commissioned two years previously by wealthy American accounting executive Carl Tilden Keller, who already had versions of Cervantes's novel in Icelandic, Japanese, and Mongolian. The translators were two Kashmiri pandits who knew no Spanish and worked from an 18th-century English version. - The Guardian
Nearly a century old, it’s still avidly read and discussed in MFA circles, thanks to its author’s meticulous dissection of the devices of fiction, likely more valuable than any of the most recent craft books on the shelves. - LA Review of Books
"Accustomed to being seen as dedicated public servants in their communities, (they) have found themselves … labeled pedophiles on social media, called out by local politicians and reported to law enforcement officials." - The New York Times
Irish writers have been dropped from the exam curriculum in British schools in favour of writers from more diverse backgrounds. Poets Seamus Heaney and Eavan Boland and playwright Brian Friel have been removed from both the GCSE and A-levels curriculums. - Irish Times
As a writer, the key is not so much assembling reams and reams of material, but finding the details that make a period or situation vivid for you and, eventually, for the reader – those few facts which make a sprawling and multi-faceted topic specific enough to relate to and empathise with. - The Conversation
Roffey's The Mermaid of Black Conch "joins an impressive wave of recent books by Trinidadian women writers, including Ingrid Persaud's Love After Love and Ayanna Lloyd Banwo's When We Were Birds, which are helping redefine a literature once dominated by noisy men." - Yahoo! (Los Angeles Times)
When Caro was almost finished with “The Power Broker,” he got an agent, Lynn Nesbit, and she matched him up with Gottlieb. If there is any enmity between Caro and Gottlieb, it would seem to be a remnant of Caro’s pain at the amount of material Gottlieb cut from “The Power Broker.” - The New Yorker
Every year since 2014 a prominent writer to submit a manuscript, and the commissioning will continue until 2113. Then, a century after the project began, they will all finally be published. - BBC
