The organization’s annual awards, which it typically gives out in the spring to works published the previous year, are unusual in that book critics, rather than authors or academics, select the winners. The awards are open to any book published in English in the United States. - The New York Times
"We experience art as a repository of our humanity, a representation that tries to capture the meaning we seek in our lives. Treating art as a means to an end feels degrading, like reducing the worth of a service worker to the service she performs. The best self-improvement scheme I can think of is to prove ourselves better than...
Don't worry: so far, there's no evidence that they're forgeries. But "the editors of a scholarly volume in which the circumstances of the discovery were detailed have formally retracted the chapter because the manuscript's 'provenance is tainted'" — which is to say, the story told to researchers by the current owner of the manuscripts of how he acquired them...
Debates ensued about whether the choice of a translator should be only merit-based or whether identity should play a part. Another thread was about publisher practices and how translators are chosen. Some White translators who have spent their careers translating writers of color into other languages questioned their own pursuits. - Washington Post
"Today innovation is one of the most hallowed words in the contemporary lexicon. That onetime pariah term is now revered. Linguists call this process one of “semantic shift,” a significant change in a word’s meaning. Examples of such shifts are no further than Google News: cookie, cancel, gay, pod." - The American Scholar
Edgar Allan Poe ended his short story with "Darkness and Decay and the Red Death illimitable dominion over all." Others, from Daniel Defoe to Mary Shelley to Jack London, leave only a few survivors behind. José Saramago and Albert Camus handle things more subtly but perhaps more painfully. Jill Lepore gives us a look. - The New Yorker
Because we use screens for social purposes and for amusement, we all — adults and children — get used to absorbing online material, much of which was designed to be read quickly and casually, without much effort. And then we tend to use that same approach to on-screen reading with harder material that we need to learn from, to...
"For a few decades in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, authors from across ideologies and genres published stories that today would be called 'cli-fi,' or climate fiction." Among those authors were no less than Mark Twain and Jules Verne (who wrote about industrialists intentionally heating the Arctic in order to mine coal). - JSTOR Daily
The magazine, co-founded and long run by the late George Plimpton, "has a new editor, only the sixth since being founded in 1953, but its third since 2017. Emily Stokes, currently a senior editor at The New Yorker, succeeds Emily Nemens, who announced earlier this month that she was leaving to work on a new book." - AP
"In a town under siege from Assad's regime, a small group of revolutionaries found a new mission: to build a library from books rescued from the rubble. For those stranded in the city, books offered an imaginative escape from the horrors of war." - The Guardian
As libraries continue to examine their role in digital life, they recognize that one of their critical and unique weapons is the hands-on, brains-on human capital of the librarians and library staff. They have been helping people research and navigate through their online lives for a long time. With libraries’ well-earned and precious reputation as a trusted place with...
Don't just salivate over Ulysses, The Wasteland, and the soon-to-come centennial of 1922. Where would modernist English literature be without Great Gatsby? Mrs. Dalloway? John Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer? Or Hemingway's In Our Time? - The New York Times
TikTok might not be the place we think of immediately for book reviews - but a lot of bookbuyers - that is, young women - do. "Miriam Parker, a vice president and associate publisher at Ecco, which released The Song of Achilles , said the company saw sales spike on Aug. 9 but couldn’t figure out why. It eventually...
And many Black authors resent the implication. Yaa Gyasi on her time touring the United States after her book Homegoing came out: "I was exhausted, not just by the travel but by something that is more difficult to articulate – the dissonance of the black spotlight, of being revered in one way and reviled in another, a revulsion that...
