John S. Jacobs escaped his master in 1839, joined a whaling crew and eventually landed in Australia, where he published The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots — a memoir of enslavement and escape and a ferocious critique of the US Constitution — in a Sydney newspaper in 1855. - The New York Times
"People attempting to recover from unhealthy obsessions unanimously report a tendency to overthink to the point of debility. Riding the subway uptown to the Scrabble club, I considered the ways I’d replaced one addiction with another." - The Paris Review
The German novelist shares with translator Michael Hoffmann the £50,000 award for Kairos, which "follows the destructive love affair between a 19-year-old student and a married man in his 50s who meet on a bus in East Berlin around 1986. Their relationship comes to embody the German Democratic Republic's 'crushed idealism.'" - BBC
"The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a Penguin Random House division, announced Monday the dismissals of Alfred A. Knopf publisher Reagan Arthur and Pantheon/Schocken publisher Lisa Lucas. A publishing official … said that the restructuring was for financial reasons." - AP
Whether they’re from classics or gothic novels, Cannes usually shows some Very Serious Literary fare looking for distribution - and this year is no different. - LitHub
When Munro won the Nobel Prize in 2013, the Swedish Academy called her “a master of the contemporary short story.” The queen of subtly intense psychological stories about the ways rural poverty grinds down those trapped in it, and the price of freedom, died last week. - Open Culture
By a human, that is. “I did an event with Leila Slimani where she said she thought her translators know her better than her family. She puts most of her consciousness and her life into her books, and we translators are more connected to them than anybody else.” - The Guardian (UK)
Witherspoon: “When there’s a big economic shift in the media business, it’s not the superhero movies or independent films we lose out on. It’s the middle, which is usually where women live. … So I decided to fund a company to make those kinds of movies.” - The New York Times
What Munro did was not so much write about women as write from inside them. When her characters don’t understand exactly what they’re feeling, she expresses it in such a way that you can both feel the confusion yourself and see beneath it to its cause. - The New Yorker
"What does it mean to defend writers amid a polarizing war? When should a group that promotes free expression for all take sides? And at a time of extreme humanitarian crisis that some see as genocide, is a commitment to big-tent dialogue a necessity, or a dodge?" - The New York Times
"On Tuesday, 97% of Condé Union members voted 'yes' on a three-year deal" settled after 18 months of negotiations. "The agreement, which averted a threatened strike from workers at the Met Gala, boosts wages by $3.6 million in total and converts company permalancers into full-time staffers." - The Hollywood Reporter
They call it “filler,” and it’s hard not to regard it as something bordering on the sublinguistic, an almost intolerable torturing of the magnificent instrument bequeathed to us by Shakespeare and his successors. - Hedgehog Review
