"Germany has begun to open to travelers and the Frankfurt Book Fair is planning on hosting a live, in-person fair this October 20-24. 'It will be smaller in scale and more focused,' Juergen Boos, the fair director, told PW. A number of virtual events are also being planned and the city of Frankfurt will again host author events for...
The unionization effort has created an uncomfortable moment for the writers at The New Yorker, who have the kind of jobs and influence every journalist wants but few attain. - The New York Times
Books can be intensely powerful for some people, especially when the books do the work of repairing past pain. "'So many queer people 'have been through immense pain growing up in our adolescence,' Dr. Matos told me. Attempts by the broader culture to 'limit who we loved, what we desire, what we do with our bodies' abound. In these...
First, meme well (and second, make She Memes Well the title of your memoir). In her new book, comedian and meme power user Quinta Brunson "breaks down her journey from struggling stand-up comedian to being recognized by strangers all over the world. The book includes hilarious anecdotes about growing up in West Philadelphia, being a Black woman, dating and...
Living authors like Kate Mosse and Philip Pullman are worried because as Britain exits the EU, protections have changed. "Authors and publishers fear that changing the rules could mean that cheap international editions of a book would pour into the UK, eroding the money authors could make from a domestic sale." - The Guardian (UK)
Komunyakaa: Writing poetry "feels like one has been chosen as a caretaker of observation. There's a certain reality, but also there's a certain kind of dreaming, and that place takes us someplace that we never dreamt of." - NPR
For decades, the literary world disdained historical fiction. "It has been seen as its own fusty fashion, relentlessly uncontemporary and easy to caricature, filled with mothballed characters who wear costumes rather than clothes, use words like 'Prithee!' while having modern-day thoughts, and occasionally encounter villains immediately recognizable by their yellow teeth or suspicious smell. What light could such novels...
The writers, contributors, and freelance editorial workers are prepared to produce a strike issue - or a Labor Peace issue. It all depends on how negotiations end up. - LitHub
Taylor's Real Life hit many "best of" lists for 2020, and a collection of loosely linked short stories comes out this month. "My most formative early reading was the Bible, which haunts me still, and the first author I loved was Pat Conroy, because the lyrical language of The Prince of Tides sounded so much like the Bible. I tried to imitate...
The old critics used familiar terms of analysis—irony, structure, symbol . . . The new theorists traded in logocentrism, “the Other,” undecidability, “infinite paradigm of difference.” Their vocabulary reduced the audience for academic criticism. American undergraduates couldn’t understand it, but so what? - First Things
It’s unknown how many books are affected by the bug. The number of ratings per book lost seem, without any further information, to be random. Authors took to Twitter with their worries, because for authors, the loss of reviews and ratings is in no way a simple error or a minor issue, as the platform is a powerful tool...
Graeme Wood, who studied both languages himself, talked with a Princeton professor (who did not wish to be named) who says that the department expects no drop in the actual number of students who study Latin and Greek — but that there may be majors who don't need to learn the languages, just as not all English majors need...
"Oxford University's right to print books was first recognised in 1586, in a decree from the Star Chamber. But the centuries-old printing history of Oxford University Press will end this summer, after the publishing house announced the last vestige of its printing arm was closing. The closure of Oxuniprint, which will take place on 27 August subject to consultation...
Complaining about other, more successful writers is one of the most popular activities on Twitter, as is devising elaborately exacting standards of correct speech and vigorously, if informally, prosecuting those who violate them. - Slate
