No Modernism Without Lesbians is the title of Diana Souhami's most recent book - and the "hugely enjoyable" history of queer women like Stein, Toklas, Natalie Barney, and Sylvia Beach has won an LGBTQ-specific prize in Britain. - The Guardian (UK)
“There is no such thing as an individual work in literature.” The work is always part of a “system of literature,” in which the arts are interrelated. Indeed, “f a literary work is torn from the context of one literary system and moved to another, it will take on a different coloring. - LA Review of Books
“There’s this fantastic description of the gothic – that it is not a genre at all, but a virus that attaches itself to genres and infects texts, and also morphs through time and adapts as needed. I think horror perhaps could be seen as the same thing.” - The Guardian
Faced with uncertainty surrounding the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the ancients rushed to fill in gaps, in essence producing a biography of the poet who, it was assumed, must have lived at some point in the past. - Lapham's Quarterly
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
