After the fire, the artist went to the American Academy in Rome. "I always say Rome was a great place to be depressed. I could not paint in my airy Academy studio with its spectacular views over the city. Instead, I went to museums" - and started a novel. - LitHub
Quantifying my reading, whether by titles finished, pages read, or another metric, doesn’t capture the quality of my attention to each book. - The Atlantic
"It's worth asking now, five years after Roth’s death, whether they have eclipsed the actual work that Roth produced, or any true reckoning with the man himself. … Will (his) literary output enjoy the same immortality as that of the persona he created?" - The Atlantic (MSN)
Last spring, the library in Lake Luzerne announced, as a one-time event, a drag queen story hour. After months of strife that included a bomb threat and a fistfight at a council meeting, most of the staff and board resigned and the library had to shut down. - The New York Times
The emergence of English as the predominant (though not exclusive) international language is seen by many as a positive phenomenon with several practical advantages and no downside. However, it also raises problems that are slowly beginning to be understood and studied. - The Guardian
"A federal judge has blocked two key portions of SF 496, a recently passed Iowa state law that sought to ban books with sexual content from Iowa schools and to bar classroom discussion of gender identity and sexuality for students below the seventh grade." - Publishers Weekly
"Louise Glück’s … mode of lamentation was her signature, and it seems fitting that one of her poems occasions the end of this column after nine years." - The New York Times Magazine
Syriac, a 2,000-year-old tongue closely related to the Aramaic spoken by Jesus of Nazareth, is today the language of Iraq's Orthodox Christians, a community whose numbers have fallen from 1.5 million to 400,000 over the last twenty war-torn years. A new all-Syriac network is helping keep the language alive. - The World
The trial judge ruled that defendant Hadi Matar and his attorney are entitled to a copy of the manuscript and related material as part of preparing their defense. They are to reply on Wednesday whether they want to postpone the trial until they can receive and read the book. - AP
"A job is a material thing, a book is a material thing—a product—and if we are going to analyze material things we should set forth on the basic understanding that, as a job, bookselling is a victim to much the same trappings as any other job: the exploitation of its workforce." - Public Books
The effect on the B.L. has been traumatic. Its electronic systems are still largely incapacitated. When I visited the library last Monday, the reading rooms were listless and loosely filled. “It’s like a sort of institutional stroke,” Inigo Thomas, a writer for the London Review of Books, told me. - The New Yorker
The bans and the battles over them, writes Laura Miller, might achieve the goal of their wealthy conservative backers (destroy citizens' faith in public schools and libraries so they can be privatized), but they won't, and can't, keep kids from learning about the subject matter. - Slate
New research released by the American Library Association found that more than half of Gen Zers and Millennials surveyed in 2022 had visited a physical library location in the previous year. And of the Gen Zers and Millennials who said that they did not identify as readers, more than half still reported going to the library. - The Atlantic
An author puts a hold on releasing a Russia-set novel, private equity buys one of the big US publishers, controversies break out over the work of two big-name dead writers, book-banners (including a certain governor) on the warpath, people flip out over software … - Literary Hub
Fay Weldon, Russell Banks, Charles Simic, Kenzaburo Oe, Dubravka Ugresic, D.M. Thomas, Martin Amis, Cormac McCarthy, Robert Gottlieb, Milan Kundera, Edith Grossman, Louise Glück, A.S. Byatt, … - Literary Hub
