"The decades-long transition from a comic originally serialized in the pages of an alternative magazine to a mainstream, foundational, and even, yes, educational book has created a tension between the kind of text it is and the kind of text it's expected to be." - The Nation
Quite quickly, I figured out that if you want an AI to imitate Raymond Chandler, the last thing you should do is ask it to write like Raymond Chandler. That produces a tepid, banal rip-off. - The Atlantic
Penguin Random House will release En agosto nos vemos (We'll See Each Other in August) throughout Latin America in 2024. The roughly 150-page book will consist of five separate sections about a protagonist named Ana Magdalena Bach (no relation to the composer). No English version has been announced. - The Guardian
"Washington University professor Carl Phillips has won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his most recent book, Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020. The collection chronicles an era of American culture roiled by crises of politics, identity and the pandemic." - St. Louis Public Radio
She was honored for five essays, among them "Hanya's Boys," about how author Hanya Yanagihara (A Little Life) tortures her gay male characters so that she can heal them, and "The Mixed Metaphor," about the trend of the mixed-race Asian character in American literature. - New York Magazine
For the first time, two winners split the fiction prize: Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead, and Diaz's Trust. Also honored were Beverly Gage's J. Edgar Hoover biography G-Man, Jefferson Cowie's Freedom's Dominion, Hua Hsu's memoir Stay True, and Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa's His Name Is George Floyd. - AP
Sure. Here's a list of "a few unconventional work novels that remind us of the way things once were, offer alternatives to the way we approach our jobs and, perhaps, spur us onward to new horizons." - LitHub
"Generally, there is something subversive and inspiring about the people Maria Isabel Sánchez Vegara chooses to immortalize (RuPaul! David Bowie!), which raises the question, what 'big dreams' did Prince Charles have as the lifelong successor to his mother’s empire and the £1 billion Duchy of Cornwall?" - LitHub
The Asian American bookstore was never just abou the books - the owners' vision was to create a place "that used books and reading and knowledge to create unity, and to be able to bring people more and more into the movement to change the world." - NPR
Asghar's When We Were Sisters "follows three orphaned Muslim-American siblings left to raise one another in the aftermath of their parents' death. The prize jury wrote that Asghar 'weaves narrative threads as exacting and spare as luminous poems.'" - NPR
"If we all know that the largest children’s publisher in the country, the one with the most access to schools, is capitulating behind closed doors and asking authors to change their works ... there’s no way you as a marginalized author can find an audience." - The New York Times
As we await Monday's prize announcements, here's a look back at Jennifer Egan, Colson Whitehead, Louise Erdrich, Colson Whitehead (again), Cormac McCarthy, Elizabeth Strout, Marilynne Robinson, and many more. - LitHub
In Missouri and Texas, state lawmakers have been considering laws that would remove funding from libraries that host drag queen story hours or don't block access to certain books; individual counties in some other states have gone through with such cuts. Many librarians fear things will get worse. - NPR
"Illinois lawmakers greenlighted a bill Wednesday that says libraries in the state must adopt an anti-book banning policy to receive state funding, in a vote that fissured along party lines. … Gov. J.B. Pritzker said he looks forward to signing it." - AP
Until the past year’s insipid Musk-related shenanigans, the platform functioned as an efficient information delivery system that made it unique among its social media rivals — and unique, for that matter, among the media organs that depended on it for readers and ideas. - N+1
