Spotify-like Kindle Unlimited subscriptions have made fiction into an “‘always on’ utility” that prioritizes “serial plenitude over singular encounters.” - The Baffler
The cheap, cheesy horror stories became so popular, especially among older children and teens, that they were arguably a bigger factor in spreading literacy than was the introduction of mandatory public education. - Atlas Obscura
The Nieman Journalism Lab asked its readers who had cancelled to tell them why, and hundreds did. Ideological or political bias was cited, but it was by no means the primary reason. - Nieman Lab
Craft, Matthew Salesses explains, is a series of expectations, and until those expectations are made explicit, they will enforce the status quo by concealing their traits as the marks of quality, of literariness. - The Nation
Having built a thriving multibillion-dollar web fiction industry at home, Chinese web novel platforms are increasingly looking to sell their stories — and the innovative way they mass-produce them — to literature lovers abroad. - Protocol
“Afterlives,” which explores the brutality of Germany’s colonial rule in East Africa, came out in Britain in September 2020 and was hailed as a masterpiece. But it failed to reach a wide readership and wasn’t even published in the United States. - The New York Times
It's not as simple as Urdu=Muslim and Hindi=Hindu. Not only did the two languages — which share all their grammar and most of their vocabulary — develop in tandem, but Hindi got many of its most basic features, including its name, via Urdu from Persian. - Scroll (India)
When it comes to writing, naming is one of the more fun problems of fiction, perhaps especially speculative fiction, where names can be as elaborate, archaic, or invented as the imaginative worlds they inhabit. - LitHub
By means he won't disclose, a journalist acquired thousands of manuscript pages by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, revered in France for literary craftsmanship but reviled for anti-Semitism and collaborating with the Nazis. That conflict is being rehashed, and a battle with Céline's heirs has arisen. - The New York Times
For years it has been illegal in France to sell new books at a discount, which has kept bookstores from being undersold by the e-commerce giant. Free shipping is prohibited as well — so Amazon has been offering shipping for one cent. New legislation ends that loophole. - Reuters
Presumably, it would be those of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s rank, or, in other direction, people completely outside of the medical world: artists documenting an isolated world, Zadie Smith essaying deserted aisles, comedians bringing sense back to a world inaner than usual. - LitHub
Parul Sehgal: "The author is dead; long live the service provider. The reader, in turn, has been reborn as a consumer in the contemporary marketplace, the hallmarks of which are the precision and the reliability with which particular desires are met." - The New Yorker
It’s a popular idea, these days, that all it takes is a kindly benefactor to set things right. Unfortunately, it is and will always be futile to rely on the benevolence of the wealthy, even wealthy institutions for that matter, to act in the best interest of the arts or the general public. - Gawker
Author Jocelyn Nicole Johnson taught art for decades before her first novel was published. My Monticello was easy to imagine, she says, "because it was me nudging forward from the very real fears I had after 12 August 2017." - The Guardian (UK)
Virginia Heffernan read them for us. "Loathsome characters bring out zestful writing, and authors who represent Trump as perilous to democracy ... could find that the danger the former president poses to America’s future is more cinematic than democracy itself." - The Atlantic
