ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

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Book Banning Comes To Newtown, CT… And Fails

Republicans on the Newtown Board of Education sought to have Flamer by Mike Curato and Blankets by Craig Thompson removed from the local high school library as if Connecticut was some benighted red state. - The Daily Beast

Salman Rushdie’s Next Book Will Be About His Getting Stabbed Onstage

"It will be a relatively short book, a couple of hundred pages. It's not the easiest book in the world to write but it's something I need to get past in order to do anything else. … So I just have to deal with it." - The Guardian

This Dave Eggers Project Lets Young Readers Edit Books-In-Progress Written For Their Age Group

"'We started cooking up this idea of showing students or classes written manuscripts and saying, 'What do you think?' To show them the process as it went along.' And so the Young Editors Project was born." - The New York Times Book Review

A New Dictionary Of African-American Language

It is not simply about the words that appear in letters, books, poems and lyrics. It is also about the words that morphed into other pronunciations and evolved to have a veiled meaning, for the safety of Black people. - The New York Times

Bookstores, Publishers, And Libraries Join Together To Sue Arkansas Over Law That Could Criminalize Librarians

"Seventeen plaintiffs — including the ALA's Freedom to Read Foundation, the Association of American Publishers, the American Booksellers Association, and the Authors Guild — will file a federal lawsuit over a recently passed law in Arkansas ... which exposes librarians to criminal liability for making allegedly 'obscene' books available to minors." - Publishers Weekly

Winning The Nobel Prize Was Not A Happy Experience For Annie Ernaux

"So I'm going to be brutal and say that I obtained a prize I never wanted. The Nobel Prize fell upon me. It fell into my life like a bomb. It was an enormous disruption; since winning it, I cannot write and the act of the writing was always my future." - The Guardian

When The World Ends With A Whimper

"I like to imagine that I would survive, thrive even, conveniently forgetting that my life of indoor pursuits, reading, writing, and streaming drama box sets whilst ordering pizza, has probably not provided me with the skills I’d need." - LitHub

How Did A Novel About Game Development Become A Multi-Year Bestseller?

Gabrielle Zevin, author of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, isn't sure. And it's a bit weird for her. "Even though is not her first book, or even her first to be a best seller, many readers are coming to her work for the first time." - The New York Times

When Langston Hughes Wrote A Children’s Book

In 1936, Hughes and artist Elmer W. Brown put together and shopped around The Sweet and Sour Animal Book. No publisher acquired the book, but the original verses and pictures have been reunited for a museum show in Cleveland. - The New York Times

Rare Books Damaged In Italy’s Recent Floods Are Being Salvaged By Flash-Freezing Them

"Volunteers have been transporting the books and other precious documents, which became submerged in water and mud in flooded libraries in the worst-affected areas, to Cesena, where the items will be placed on shelves in temperatures of -25C (-13F) in industrial-size freezers provided by (frozen-food company) Orogel." - The Guardian

This Publisher Is Building A Business On Old Out-Of-Print Books

"A company called Open Road Integrated Media is trying to (give) a second life to older books. It does that by using machine learning to make those titles more visible online and ... by republishing books that were largely forgotten or had fallen out of print." - The New York Times

Why The US Needs Its Own Bookfair

The U.S. is the biggest English-language publishing market it the world, yet it’s one of the few large countries without an industrywide conference. - Publishers Weekly

To This They’ve Come: Florida School Forbids Amanda Gorman’s Inauguration Poem To Grade-School Students

"A parent of a student at Bob Graham Education Center in Miami Lakes objected to the poem, for which they erroneously listed Oprah Winfrey as the author/publisher. … It 'is not educational and have (sic) indirectly hate messages,' the complaint said, adding that the poem would 'cause confusion and indoctrinate students.'" - CNN

International Booker Prize 2023 Goes To Georgi Gospodinov and Angela Rodel for “Time Shelter”

"(The novel) imagines the 'first clinic of the past,' in which Alzheimer's patients can visit different time periods of their lives on different floors." As The Guardian's reviewer put it, "this funny yet frightening Bulgarian novel explores the weaponisation of nostalgia." - NPR

Hi! We’d Love To Publish Your Book. But Could You Take Out Any Reference To Racism?

In what Maggie Tokuda-Hall described as a “Faustian bargain,” Scholastic made the offer contingent on removing mentions of the Japanese American incarceration that tied that history to a broader past during this “politically sensitive” moment. They also asked her to remove the word “racism.” - Seattle Times

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