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."Â - 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
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 (BenjamÃn 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)
