Author and illustrator Jansson found her dream island when she was in her '50s. "Klovharun in the Finnish archipelago is tiny – some 6,000 sq metres – and isolated, 'a rock in the middle of nowhere,' according to Jansson’s niece, Sophia. It has scarcely any foliage, no running water and no electricity. Yet for Jansson, it was an oasis....
Happy Pride Month! Um: The author of the groundbreaking Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and many other experimental, daring works wrote on Twitter, "“Absolutely hated the cosy little domestic blurbs on my new covers. Turned me into wimmins fiction of the worst kind! Nothing playful or strange or the ahead of time stuff that’s in there. So I...
Or so says Zakiya Dalila Harris, the author of The Other Black Girl. The book is a combined thriller and social satire that was indeed inspired by Harris' experiences. "Part of me enjoyed editing and I felt I was good at it, but it’s also an exhausting job for an entry-level person in terms of the pay. I was...
Sounds ridiculous, right? What do literary novels have in common with Avengers or WandaVision? Benjamin Percy says his Comet Cycle came about because he wanted to "go wild, do something different, change shit up, and create an experience—from a creative and business perspective—that was lit from beginning to end." - LitHub
In the U.S., people like nonfiction, especially self-help - and cookbooks, and sex advice. The books in the best-seller canon "are not books so much as appliances. They are not read; they are used. And probably many of them have been bought by people who do not otherwise buy many books." - The New Yorker
"Authors have little interest in writing them, editors have little interest in publishing them, and — though the hypothesis has yet to be tested — it's widely assumed that readers would have little interest in buying them. In many ways, the dynamic represents a microcosm of the current political moment: Facing a new president whose relative dullness is his...
"The $7 million lawsuit … alleges that Dirk Obbink stole 32 items from the Egyptian Exploration Society at the University of Oxford's Sackler Library and sold them to Hobby Lobby, the nationwide arts and crafts chain owned by an evangelical Christian family," which was trying to rapidly assemble a collection for the Museum of the Bible, which it opened...
"Linguists trace this shift to Philadelphia's elite schools. Any way of speaking that falls outside the norm is viewed negatively in certain settings, so students at these schools may feel pressured to adapt the less noticeable mid-Atlantic accent. … If the trend continues, the classic Philly accent could become extinct within two decades." - Mental Floss
"Diop, the author of two novels, and his translator Anna Moschovakis, split the £50,000 annual prize, which goes to the best author and translator of a work translated into English. At Night All Blood Is Black follows Alfa Ndiaye, a Senegalese soldier fighting for France in the first world war, whose descent into madness after the death of a...
Though "Asian fantasy" has been exploding in popularity as a sub-genre of science fiction and fantasy, not all authors think that's a good categorization. R.F. Kuang, of the tremendous The Poppy War trilogy, says the name "doesn't really make a lot of sense, either as a literary category or as an identity category. Obviously, there are a lot of...
"The Internet's favorite catalog of weird places" (as the headline fittingly describes it) is going through what it's calling (for lack of a term that's both better and more timely) a "decolonization project" — reviewing its thousands of listings and hundreds of articles to include the roles and viewpoints of Black, indigenous, and and other Americans traditionally overlooked. But,...
Here's the story of a set of seven comic strips, called "the Hagemeyer strips" after their main character, set in an office, with protagonists who seem an awful lot like grownup versions of Charlie Brown and Lucy Van Pelt. (Poor Charlie Brown — the Lucy character is his boss.) - The Washington Post
The first, Mary E. Jones Parrish, was a relative newcomer to Tulsa when the events of May 31, 1921, went down. She was an educator, but "the massacre compelled her to become a journalist and author, writing down her own experiences and collecting the accounts of many others. Her book Events of the Tulsa Disaster, published in 1923, was the first...
