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Someone Thought Putting The Bible, The US Constitution, And Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless The USA” In One Book Was A Good Idea

"Big-name Christian authors penned a letter blasting it as 'dangerous,' and more than 900 people signed a petition decrying the decision to print it. The advertised publisher, part of HarperCollins Christian Publishing, disavowed the book and denied it ever planned to print it in the first place." - Slate

Supply Chain Problems Are Still Plaguing Publishing, And There Might Be Book Shortages For Christmas

"Supply chain problems have touched almost every aspect of book production, storage, and delivery, mostly as a result of Covid-related bottlenecks. Printer capacity issues plagued the publishing industry last year, too, though 2021 is expected to be worse." - Yahoo! (Quartz)

Sally Rooney’s New Book Hits Weird New Benchmark

The data show that Beautiful World, Where Are You is the most reviewed book of all time. - LitHub

The Best Ever Sword And Sorcery Books

Or the best for this not very fantastic time on the planet, anyway. - Washington Post

What’s Even The Purpose Of Political Writing Anymore?

Osita Nwanevu: "The morsels of rage and misery we offer might not have much political effect, but they do feed an online writing economy that rewards speed, quantity, and deference to algorithms designed for the profit of three or four tech companies." - Columbia Journalism Review

Unknown Tennessee Williams Story Sees Print At Last

"Honored worldwide as a playwright, Williams also wrote dozens of short stories. A rarely seen piece, 'The Summer Woman,' set in Italy, appears this week in the fall issue of the literary quarterly The Strand Magazine." - AP

Most Diverse Booker Prize Finalists List Ever

Four debut novelists – Diane Cook, Avni Doshi, Douglas Stuart and Brandon Taylor – are up against the acclaimed Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembga, and the Ethiopian-American Maaza Mengiste for the £50,000 award. - The Guardian

Loving Or Hating Ebooks: The Quality Of ‘Bookiness’

"Whether you love or hate ebooks is probably a function of what books mean to you, and why. … What it means to read, what the experience of reading requires and entails, and what makes it pleasurable or not, is not so easy to pin down." - The Atlantic

The New Yorker’s Archivist Counted Up Decades’ Worth Of Nonwhite Writers’ Bylines, And …

Erin Overbey: "As someone who's done the research, seen all the numbers, I can tell you that things are simply not changing quickly enough to present real, concrete progress." - Nieman Lab

Is There *Anything* To The Idea That You Can Learn A Foreign Language While You Sleep?

Well, you can't say there's nothing to it. But there's not much. And don't even think that playing recordings of the language while you’re lying there unconscious will save you from studying grammar and sentence structure. But yeah, it can help a little. - Mic

How The Word “Performative” Got Corrupted

What is worse, the meaning of performative in contemporary parlance, while not very precise, is almost exactly the opposite of the word’s original meaning. - Hedgehog Review

Why Do We Still Care About Shakespeare?

So why do we still read him, and why do so many people still flock to his plays, despite their archaisms lichened with footnotes and, to citizens of our ironic century, his easily parodied apostrophizing? Why do we still care? - Washington Post

A College Honors Class Turned Its Zoom Fan Fiction Into A Film Deal

Last year, The Great Gatsby came out of copyright, and that's a good thing for a The Great Gatsby 2.0 honors seminar at the University of Iowa. - LitHub

The Larger Narrative Arc Of Colson Whitehead’s Novels

Basically, it's weird jobs. "All these different jobs provide existential questions about how the world works and how they work, how they function, I guess." - Slate

Nicaragua’s Government Is Arresting Prominent Writers Before A Presidential Election

"State prosecutors in Nicaragua have ordered the arrest of one of the country’s most prominent writers, Sergio Ramírez, accusing the 78-year-old novelist of inspiring hatred and conspiring to destabilize Nicaragua." Those charges sound common these days in Nicaragua. - LitHub

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