"A federal judge has issued a default judgment against a major overseas e-book piracy operation known as the KISS Library after its operators failed to answer a lawsuit filed in July, 2020 by the Authors Guild, Amazon Publishing, Penguin Random House, and a number of authors." - Publishers Weekly
And the authors of those books — who, not long ago, couldn't get a single look from publishers — can thank social media: Booksgram, BookTube, and BookTok. - The Guardian
How the pulp nonfiction devoured by the public during Tsar Alexander II's reign led to Crime and Punishment — and how Dostoevsky used the hunger for true crime stories to get his political message into the public's hands. - The New Republic
In November, we presented a list of the 25 most-nominated books (one per author) for a vote. After tallying more than 200,000 ballots, the winner, by a narrow margin, is... - The New York Times
"Far from being a children's story, Bambi was actually a parable about the inhumane treatment and dangerous precariousness of Jews and other minorities in what was then an increasingly fascist world, the new translation will show." - The Observer (UK)
The U.S. has an incredibly rich heritage of Indigenous languages ranging from Anishinaabe to Cherokee, Navajo to Tewa. But they are almost all endangered, in part because the U.S. spent two hundred years and $2.81 billion trying to destroy them. - The Hill
A band of booksellers moved into the empty barns and transformed the place into a literary lodestone. The village of about 400 became home to more than two dozen bookstores — more shops than cows, its boosters liked to say — and thousands of tourists thronged the winsome streets. - Washington Post
The well-rehearsed rhetorical drama over this kind of conceptual terminology is only one of the ways in which arguments over definitions and usage have risen to prominence and in some cases become almost synonymous with the desire for social change in recent years. - The Point
In Virginia, Texas, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere, whether the topic is race, sexuality, history, or something else, grownups trying to keep particular books from teens end up reminding the teens that those books exist and can be obtained from booksellers. - The Guardian
So how does language and thought relate, then? And what is “thought”, anyway? Perhaps one way of answering both questions is to determine whether any of the representations language provides – syntactic, phonological, semantic, etc. – are suitable for the “fixation of belief.” - 3 Quarks Daily
"Among the titles being cast into the maw of the volcano this year: Blake Bailey's oozing hagiography of Philip Roth, Mitch Albom's latest cavity-inducing parable, Andrew Sullivan's overfull toilet of essays" (fed to the merciless Dale Peck) "and Malcolm Gladwell's smug apologia for American butchery." - Book Marks
"Cervantes knew that after the terrible, dogmatic reality in which he lived, there would be imagination. But" — having spent years in Algiers — "the power, beauty, humor, and eloquence of Islamic Spain wasn't something he had to imagine." - Public Books
What makes for a good word, in the eyes of a crossword-puzzle constructor? The language of aesthetic judgment is gustatory—one has good taste or feels something in one’s gut—but crosswords are meant to transcend physical sensations. - The New Yorker
There is a contradiction here of both scorning a system that’s shallow and rigged, and also feeling bitter about not being able to succeed within such a system in order to get our remuneration. - The Point
