That is, the '20s that were a century ago. Princess Mysteria's columns in The Defender "presented a stark contrast with other advice writing of the time, and not only because white advice columnists tended to toe a racist line when it came to matters of segregation and racial hierarchy, and rarely printed letters from Black correspondents. The columnist believed...
As speculative fiction from African writers starts to gain mainstream press attention in the U.S. and U.K., readers might wonder where to start. Short story anthologies? A trilogy about an alien invasion of Lagos? (Yes, definitely.) But also, says writer Lavie Tidhar, "African literature is huge and diverse — from the Francophone works of West Africa to the Arabic...
Paris has lost 30 percent of its independent bookshops in the last 20 years, despite a lot of government intervention: "Small shops qualify for subsidies. And rents are stabilized in pricey areas of the city. To keep book prices from dropping too low, the French parliament passed a law restricting Amazon from offering free delivery and a 5% discount...
Hollie McNish, who once changed her name to "Hollie Poetry" - what she now calls "a search engine name" - says that sex and writing are linked: "All energy drives are linked. I’d call it an orgasm drive – an urge to make something specific from a dream inside your head or skin." - The Guardian (UK)
Her newest book is a deliberate picture of how America wasn't ever really great at all for quite a few people. And what's she considering now? She thinks we're all in recovery from the former president. "This is a person who colonised our brains for years. I don’t think there was a day in the last four years when...
Fifty years on (as is the rule), documents on the deliberations for the 1970 prize have just been made public, and some committee members were genuinely concerned that awarding the Soviet dissident writer, who had already spent time in the gulag, would put him in danger. While Solzhenitsyn did win that year, he didn't collect his medal until after...
"Quantifying, dissecting and broadcasting our most-loved hobbies sucks the joy out of them. I find myself glancing towards the corner of the page to see how much I've read. … Even when absorbed in the climax of a story, one eye is always on my proximity to the end, when I'll be able to post it all to Goodreads....
Árni Magnússon, who undertook Iceland's first-ever census and land survey, was a near-obsessive manuscript collector; he gathered many thousands of medieval documents, sagas, and other materials and sent them back to his house in Copenhagen. And in 1728, when the worst fire in the city's history and destroyed more than a quarter of the buildings and nearly every book...
"Those who seek to ban my book and others like it are trying to exploit fear — fear about the realities that books like mine expose, fear about desire and sex and love — and distort it into something ugly, in an attempt to wish away queer experiences." - The New York Times
Under dispute is whether or not Powell's is obliged to honor employees' prior seniority, salaries, and benefits. The union says that the store, in a string of emails last year, had agreed to honor the employees' work history upon rehiring. The store, on the other hand, asserts that, since more than 12 months have passed, they are under no...
"As we see it, one of the goals of the magazine is to help our readers remain open to the possibility that facets of everyday life and culture they might be inclined to trivialize or look down upon may have something to teach us. This doesn’t mean we don’t allow criticism, of course; criticism is part of taking something...
The unassuming 18th-century townhouse at 15 Usher's Island is where Joyce's great-aunts ran a music school, and their annual Epiphany dinner was the model for the gathering in the final story of Dubliners. Two Irish investors who bought the house for €650,000 (cheap by current Dublin standards) have gotten permits to convert the four-story building into a 56-bed tourist...
"Like many systems that appear meticulous, the writing of citations is a subjective art. Never more so than in fiction, where citation is an entirely other kind of animal, not required or even expected, except in the “acknowledgments” page, which is often a who’s who of the publishing world. (Also a good way to find out who is married to...
