An Egyptian-Canadian journalist and author who lives in Portland, Oregon, El Akkad describes his novel as "a repurposed fable. It's the story of Peter Pan inverted and recast as the story of a contemporary child refugee." - CBC
By using things like imagery, metaphor, narrative and even white space, poetry has the power to make abstract or diffuse issues, like climate change, more real to readers. - The Conversation
Founded under British rule in 1903, the South China Morning Post has managed to stay more or less independent of Beijing. Now a state-owned company is reportedly considering acquiring the paper, though current owner Alibaba (China's equivalent of Amazon) says it's not for sale. - Al Jazeera (Bloomberg)
Penguin's Classics line is 75 years old this year. But - "What makes a book a classic? Who gets to decide? And will today’s classic still be a classic in 10 years’ time, let alone 50 or 100?"- The Guardian (UK)
"BookTok is passionate. It is also profitable—at least for publishers. Bloomsbury, a publishing house based in Britain, recently reported record sales and a 220% rise in profits, which Nigel Newton, its boss, put down partly to the 'absolute phenomenon' of BookTok." - The Economist
The authors nominated for the Giller who have kids say they write whenever they can. Another: "COVID has helped me let go of a pernicious late capitalist drive which cast reading as unproductive leisure time, as opposed to an integral part of the writing process." - CBC
For $30 a month, maybe. But it lacks nuance, and can be "downright self-serving," making suggestions, for instance, to call itself an "excellent" service instead of a "nice" one. Clever, but no. - FastCompany
Boo from the Guild to the proposed Penguin Random House takeover of Simon & Schuster: "Consolidation doesn’t just stifle competition, it also makes acquisition editors less willing to take risks," the Guild says. And that's bad for consumers, er, readers. - Los Angeles Times
Just ask Laura Davis: "After many failed attempts at story architecture, with the help of several editors, my brilliant coach ... and 127 early readers, I ended up with a braided structure, moving the reader through time, keeping them guessing." - Los Angeles Review of Books
During a tsunami of deeply virulent homophobic, racist protests against books, a parent in Kitsap County, Washington, has asked to prosecute librarians for having the graphic novel Gender Queer: A Memoir on high school shelves. - LitHub
Kim Sherwood has struck a deal with HarperCollins to write three contemporary thrillers set in the world of James Bond but where the original 007 is missing, presumed captured or even killed. - The Guardian
Wole Soyinka has received the Nobel Prize in Literature. He has written more than two dozen plays, a vast amount of poetry, several memoirs, essays, and short stories, and just two novels. His third novel is out now, nearly five decades after the last one. - The New Yorker
"'A frictionless world' in which evidence of the imagination floats around in the empyrean 'without cost, without registration, and without restrictive conditions on their use, … a Borgesian Library of Babel, the Review is a labyrinth to get lost in." - The Times Literary Supplement (UK)
