"The technical department had known that the original had been replaced by a copy since May 2014, when book restorers discovered it by accident during a program to preserve old books from acid-deterioration called IFADU. But despite this discovery, in these four intervening years, the forged copy of Sidereus Nuncius left by the thief continued to appear in the...
The Washington Post talked to the owners of six indies about how they weathered the year. What follows is an oral history of these shops’ highs and lows as the pandemic knocked life and business upside down. - Washington Post
Despite the pandemic, book sales were up over all last year, but mostly for places like Amazon; bookstore sales fell by more than twenty-eight per cent. Even at stores where sales held steady or increased, profits declined as customers migrated online, raising shipping and delivery costs. More than one bookstore closed every week in 2020, and many of the...
The author is pleased by the support from his publisher, but the hate has truly ramped up. Sathnam Sanghera: "In a way, it proves the need for this conversation. No conversation or theme I’ve ever tackled is as dysfunctional as empire. It’s like, the strength of opinion out there is in inverse proportion to the amount of knowledge." -...
"The belief that every novel is a self-accounting is timeworn: Some early readers of Lolita suspected that only someone with the mentality of a child predator could have conjured the depraved Humbert Humbert. Publishers, meanwhile, often appear to want readers to see books as thinly veiled autobiography, and their publicity campaigns typically emphasize authors’ personal connections to their work."...
A good memoir "gets into the feelings that are so buried and complex that they rarely come into focus in a conversation, even among good friends." - LitHub
We all have books that are waiting for just such an occasion. When the author of Homecoming and Transcendent Kingdom was young, her parents made her "write a report on the children’s book I was reading at the time. I think it was The Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister. ... I wrote something to the effect of 'This book is very...
A hard-R-rated primer to what gets said in the language of Molière when one is really f***ing p****d off, what you can use to affectionately tease your buddy in Bordeaux and what not to say unless you want to make an enemy for life. (And gosh, you can click here for a guide to what it's safe to say...
There has long been a debate about the ethics of translation, about how to translate not just the words but the spirit of the original, too. Today’s identity controversies, however, are not just about issues of formal translation but also about the kinds of informal translation in which we engage every day. - The Guardian
"Project Narrative is the world’s leading academic think tank for the study of stories, and in our research labs, with the help of neuroscientists and psychologists from across the globe, we’ve uncovered dozens more literary inventions in Zhou Dynasty lyrics, Italian operas, West African epics, classic children’s books, great American novels, Agatha Christie crime fictions, Mesoamerican myths, and even...
Librarians have been no match for the beast. When authors sign up with a publisher, it decides how to distribute their work. With other big publishers, selling e-books and audiobooks to libraries is part of the mix — that’s why you’re able to digitally check out bestsellers like Barack Obama’s “A Promised Land.” Amazon is the only big publisher...
An antiquities dealer in Jerusalem came forward in 1883 with what he claimed were fragments of the original book of Deuteronomy. After scholars at the time pronounced them forgeries, the dealer committed suicide and the fragments eventually disappeared. Now a scholar, working with old photos and transcriptions of the fragments, argues that they are an early (and somewhat different)...
For instance, ugly ethnic stereotypes from the 1920s and '30s were removed from the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books all the way back in 1959, and from Mary Poppins and The Story of Dr. Dolittle in the '80s; Roald Dahl himself rewrote the original, now-cringeworthy portrayal of the Oompa-Loompas in the early 1970s after complaints from the NAACP....
"The Build America's Libraries Act was introduced by in the House of Representatives by Reps. Andy Levin (D-MI-9) and Don Young (R-AK-at large) along with 52 cosponsors. The bill seeks to provide funds to address decades of needed repairs, updates, as well as the construction of modern library facilities in underserved and disadvantaged communities. The bill's Senate counterpart (S....
"We make changes to the books our children read all the time. In 1812, the Brothers Grimm changed the evil mothers in traditional fairy tales to wicked stepmothers, because they wanted to preserve the sanctity of motherhood. The Faraway Tree’s Dick and Fannie are Rick and Frannie in newer editions – a fact which seems to infuriate nostalgic readers...
