Graphic novels by Black, Indigenous and other people of color in the 2020s are moving beyond realistic stories and memoir to fantasy and tales shaped by family and society folklore. Says one store owner and publisher, "We've hit these boom and bust cycles. ... My hope for the industry is that this continues. There's room enough for everybody's stories."...
The history of the genre is problematic at best. "Any writer writing a Western—even a literary Western—knows that they stand on the threshold of creating something that’s equally capable of rocking backward as it is of propelling forward." - LitHub
"Like Marcel, we've spent decades building our models of the world, and like him we're starting to see them for the gimcrack that they are. We're beginning to sense just how much effort is involved in holding a person together." - Literary Hub
Most authors have day jobs, which is nothing new; Herman Melville worked as a customs inspector. The difference in 2021 is that traditional side careers are less viable and also less “side.” - Vanity Fair
The works will be kept in a room lined with wood from the forest in the Deichman library in Oslo. One hundred years after Future Library was launched, the trees will be felled, and the manuscripts printed for the first time. - The Guardian
It's part of a growing trend in publishing for books focused on the climate, whether from big hitters such as David Attenborough or Bill Gates, or so-called “cli-fi”, climate fiction." - The Guardian
"A quarter of people think of it as a compliment, a quarter of people think it's an insult and the rest either don't know or have never even heard of the term." -BBC
The Royal Society of London actually did attempt to start one in the winter of 1665, with a committee that included poets Abraham Cowley and John Dryden. Plague broke out in London that spring, everyone who could flee the capital did, and that was that. - Lapham's Quarterly
The generated voices have gotten more realistic in the age of deepfakes, a technology that uses AI to manipulate content to look and sound deceptively real. - Washington Post
The 15th-century volume is written in a neat, careful script that bears little resemblance to any natural language, and no one has yet cracked its code. In a Q&A, Yale linguist Claire Bowern talks about approaching the task with computational statistics. - Knowable
In at least 80 cultures worldwide, people have developed whistled versions of the local language when the circumstances call for it. … By studying whistled languages, (linguists) hope to learn more about how our brains extract meaning from the complex sound patterns of speech." - Knowable
Ellis’s storytelling approach, that of serializing his memoir on a podcast, allows him to exploit both types of unreliable narrator: the one who knows they’re unreliable and the one who doesn’t. - 3 Quarks Daily
Aleph Alpha, a startup in Heidelberg, Germany, has built one of the world’s most powerful AI language models. Befitting the algorithm's European origins, it is fluent not just in English but also in German, French, Spanish, and Italian. - Wired
