"Mary-Kay Wilmers … was one of the founders of the literary magazine in 1979, along with Karl Miller and Susannah Clapp, became co-editor in 1988, and has been its sole editor since 1992. In 2019, when the LRB celebrated its 40th anniversary, she was dubbed 'Britain's most influential editor' by the New York Times." - The Guardian
"The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction includes some 1,800 separate entries, from actifan and aerocar to zero-gravity and zine. … A historical dictionary devoted to the history of something as future-oriented (and imaginary) as science fiction may seem like a contradiction in terms. But then science fiction has always had a curious relationship to the real world, said Jesse...
"In many ways, the Book Review’s history is that of American letters, and we’ll be using our 125th anniversary this year to celebrate and examine that history over the coming months. In essays, photo stories, timelines and other formats, we’ll highlight the books and authors that made it all possible." - The New York Times
For two months, many thousands of farmers have been staging a massive sit-in with their tractors on the highways around New Delhi, demanding that the Indian government withdraw a package of agriculture laws that the farmers say will slash their income and make them prey to Big Agribusiness. And some of these farmworkers, with sympathetic writers and artists, have...
"There are some in the industry who believe houses have a responsibility to publish a wide range of viewpoints, seeing it as a First Amendment issue." (And conservative books have tended to sell well.) "But a burgeoning group of mostly younger industry members argue" — especially in the wake of the Capitol riot and Simon & Schuster's subsequent cancellation...
Jodi Archambault: "As COVID-19 takes a fearsome toll on our people, it also threatens the progress we have made to save our languages. The average age of our speakers — our treasured elders who have the greatest knowledge and depth of the language — is 70. They are also those who are at most risk of dying from COVID-19."...
Poet Lavinia Greenlaw, who chaired the committee for the T.S. Eliot prize, said of Kapil's How to Wash a Heart, "This is a unique work that exemplifies how poetry can be tested and remade to accommodate uncomfortable and unresolvable truths. ... It’s a book that one of the judges said, ‘Every time you start it, you have to finish...
There are shelves about "On the Troubles of Growing Up and Moving On" and "For Escaping Your Life," among many others. "Oh Hello Again owner Kari Ferguson, who previously founded Dickens Children’s Books in Vancouver, Washington, was inspired to create Oh Hello Again by Ellen Berthoud and Susan Elderkin’s concept of bibliotherapy—the idea that reading the right book at...
For white Southern writers, especially, "the deconstruction and demolition of so many of the myths about Southern culture and identity has been ongoing in literature for a long time but seems to have accelerated at a stunning rate in the past four years, and especially at the start of this year. The combined effects of these historic circumstances are...
Michelle Burford has co-written, or really, written after many hours of absorbing interviews, quite a few celebrity memoirs. She calls herself a "story architect," and her name appears on the covers of the memoirs alongside the famous counterparts. But as a Black woman, she has to tell publishers not only to think of her for Black women's memoirs: "I’ve...
Can a novel be, or feel, contemporary without references to doomscrolling or at least brushing up against social media? "While the internet and mobile phones initially posed problems for fiction writers - not least for their potential to destroy traditional plots of desire and obstruction (chance encounters, missed connections, quests), the dangers of such instant gratification increasingly appear to...
Brontez Purnell: "All good theater and literature should run the zodiac of feelings: Some of it should be sad, some of it profound; some of it should be boring and some of it should jump completely off the cliff. Whatever vehicle I’m using, I’m always trying to arrive at a certain sense of balance." - The Atlantic
The suit "alleges that the publishers pay high commissions and other costs to Amazon, which in turn increases the retail price of e-books sold on the platform. The lawsuit claims the five publishers account for 80 percent of books sold in the US, and calls the arrangement a 'conspiracy to fix the retail price of e-books,' which it argues...
Matthew Redmond teaches this class at Stanford in part "to disrupt what seems an obvious distinction between development and result, closure and continuity. On careful inspection, it is surprisingly difficult to tell what makes a novel, or any piece of writing, truly finished." Yet there was another factor this past fall quarter, "a period defined by the constant escalation...
As more and more of the internet is consolidated, discredited, and co-opted by capital, Wikipedia begins to look like a vestige of a bygone era. With its volunteer-run editing process and its open-source ethos, the site may be the one success of an early-internet ethos (crowdsourced, democratized information-sharing, with little centralized control) that otherwise has come to look like...
