When a fire gutted the bookstore Yu & Me, which founder Lucy Yu opened in New York’s Chinatown about 21 months into the pandemic - and a spate of anti-Asian violence - Yu had no idea how ridiculously much work was ahead. - The New York Times
Just ask BookTok. "Telling the internet that Harry Styles is your boyfriend is a fantasy. Telling the internet that Franz Kafka is your boyfriend — that is a thesis statement." - The New York Times
Before you start yours, consider this: What you think is riveting about your life might not seem so to others. As one publisher put it, too many submissions are “just the writer’s own story, which is ultimately boring.” - The Atlantic (MSN)
"When you’re searching for excellence, even books you might have enjoyed under normal circumstances start looking mediocre, and the process quickly becomes a slog that drains the joy from reading. But the monthly discussions with my fellow jurors — always lively, thoughtful, and respectful — were restorative." - The Ed's Up
TikTok, that's how. With The Shadow Work Journal, Keila Shaheen has become "perhaps the first self-published nonfiction author to break out in a big way on the platform, a feat she accomplished by fully harnessing its potential not just for marketing, but for direct sales." - The New York Times
The decision comes just a week after the Hay Festival cut funding ties with the investment firm. Both festivals cite "intolerable pressure," referring to boycott threats and withdrawals by participants who object to Baillie Gifford's financial ties to the fossil fuel industry and Israel. - The Herald (Scotland)
Calligraphy, a centuries-old art form, is seeing a surge of interest, including among young people more familiar with coding than cursive. - The New York Times
The purchase, which has already been completed, adds more than 40,000 academic titles published under the Rowman & Littlefield and Lexington Books imprints, which cover the subjects of academic arts, humanities, and social sciences, including in such subject areas as business and psychology, in which Bloomsbury is "building a presence," the company said. - Publishers Weekly
The Standard, which has suffered six straight annual losses (most recently, £16.4 million through October 2022), hopes to repeat the successful switch to digital-only by its sister publication, the now-profitable Independent, while continuing to be released in hard copy each week. - Press Gazette (UK)
"In them one finds a little bit of everything: fragments and false starts, alternate endings, even drawings. The notebooks were where Munro tinkered and experimented, made detours and sudden revisions — where she surveyed the whole field of possibility before committing herself to a full, typed version of a story." - The Paris Review
The British investment firm Baillie Gifford became lead sponsor of the Hay Festival in 2015, but this year a number of the marquee participants at high-profile events canceled their appearances over what they see as Baillie Gifford's excessive ties to the fossil-fuel industry and the Israeli government. - The Guardian
The deal between OpenAI and News Corp. means that ChatGPT will be drawing text and info from The Wall Street Journal and Britain's The Times, yes, but also from the New York Post and the London tabloid The Sun. - The Guardian
That editors edit, which would seem to go without saying, turns out to be a pretty facile summary of a role whose essential ambiguities make it best suited to confidence men or obsessives. The most we can say is that the editor assists the writer. - Tablet
The most potent enemy of reading, it goes without saying, is the small, flat box that you carry in your pocket. In terms of addictive properties, it might as well be stuffed with meth. There’s no point in grinding through a whole book when you can pick up your iPhone. - The New Yorker
"Macquarie University research fellow Keagan Brewer and his co-author Michelle L. Lewis seek to corroborate previous suspicions that the enigmatic illustrated text served as a medieval guide to the female reproductive system — based on its imagery and context, as opposed to its (still-unreadable) text." - Artnet
