And not 40-year-olds, y’all. “Truly older characters remain very rare in literature, with around only two to three percent of protagonists aged eighty or above. … highlights a gap in representation for our aging population, but also underscores the attributes that society deems worthy of fiction.” - LitHub
Romero, of course, is known as a director - his most famous movie being Night of the Living Dead. But an archivist working on Romero’s papers “found the manuscript of a sprawling supernatural novel — one Romero had clearly worked on extensively, and apparently in secret.” - The New York Times
Some of the fiction nominees are also on the Booker Prize Longlist, but this list adds many others, including short story collections, as well. - Washington Post (MSN)
Over the last several decades, a quiet revolution has taken place in American fiction: The novels recognized by major literary prizes have largely abandoned the present in favor of the past. Contemporary fiction has never been less contemporary. - The Nation
"The StraightForward Foundation ... acts like a pro bono literary agency. It connects Russian authors, writing about sensitive topics, to publishers abroad, who publish their work in different languages. The foundation only requires that the authors agree to post the Russian versions of their manuscripts online for free for readers back home." - NPR
Under a settlement agreement, the School Board of Nassau County (along the border with Georgia, about 35 miles northeast of Jacksonville) must restore access to 36 titles with LGBTQ content which it had ordered removed. The authors of one of those books were plaintiffs. - AP
This decision harms libraries. It locks them into an e-book ecosystem designed to extract as much money as possible while harvesting (and reselling) reader data en masse. It leaves local communities’ reading habits at the mercy of curatorial decisions made by four dominant publishing companies thousands of miles away. - MIT Technology Review
The organization argued that AI helps disabled or marginalized writers who don't have industry connections. As one of many now-former members put it, "It’s pretty insulting to imply that the only way members of marginalized communities can get their foot in the door is through the use of a plagiarism machine." - Slate (MSN)
Often the adaptation is in the style of a radio play, with sound design providing context for the original's dialogue. Sometimes the original visuals are replaced with newly-written narration. dialogue read by actors. In any case, a job which seemed near-impossible to audio publishers 20 years ago is becoming commonplace. - Publishers Weekly
As Wikipedia’s visibility diminishes, reduced to mere training data for AI applications, it also loses prominence in the minds of readers and potential contributors. - The Guardian
In certain bodies, to write about yourself at all is already to be pathologized. But there’s a difference between creative work conferring self-knowledge on a par with psychiatric insight and structuring that work to shore up the psychiatric diagnosis or breakthrough. - The Walrus
The problem is more complex than the fact that many texts were lost to the annals of history. Most people just see the most recent translation of the Iliad or works of Cicero on the shelf at a bookstore, and assume that these texts have been handed down in a fairly predictable way generation after generation. - Works in Progress
Lee, whose books include The Dressing and The Invention of the Darling, joins such previous winners as Adrienne Rich, W.S. Merwin and Joy Harjo. The prize is named for the late pharmaceutical heir whose $100 million donation to Poetry magazine in 2002 led to the creation of the Poetry Foundation." - AP
Amazon will begin inviting a small group of Audible narrators to train AI-generated voice clones of themselves this week, with the aim of speeding up audiobook production for the platform. - The Verge
The list includes two début young adult novels, one writer who has been previously honored by the National Book Awards—Randy Ribay, the author of “Everything We Never Had”—and a remarkable five novels in verse. - The New Yorker
