"Encyclopedias are not like rose bushes, for which pruning is everything. They are usually the opposite, more like Japanese knotweed, spreading wildly and germinating freely, invasive and persistent in all countries where a foothold is possible." - Literary Hub
I continue to struggle with an imaginative leap into a world that is entirely not my own. I can’t quite seem to achieve the trick of perception, the sinking-in that allows you to half-forget the conscious act of reading. But I’m strangely unmotivated, too, for reasons I can’t fully unravel. - New Statesman
"He empowers booksellers at each location to curate books based on their own quirky, idiosyncratic tastes. It's a strategy that leads to more engaged workers and more interesting stores, (CEO James) Daunt says. And importantly, it's one that Amazon has been unable to replicate." - Fast Company
Encyclopedias have always been a hard sell. Moving a hefty set of books at a big ticket price—toward its last days Britannica sold for $1,500—it could scarcely have been otherwise. - The Wall Street Journal
During the past decade, the study of English and history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third. Humanities enrollment in the United States has declined over all by seventeen per cent, Townsend found. What’s going on? - The New Yorker
“I have seen a rise of book sales, but I think most of those sales are to adults and people who listen to NPR. People in book deserts are the ones missing out. We shouldn’t have to have a lawsuit in every single school district just to have the books in schools and libraries. It’s such a drain on...
A recent YouGov survey found that a majority of Republicans favors such restrictions, but Democrats and independents are very much against them. And when given a list of 15 potentially sensitive topics, none got a majority of independents or Democrats to agree that they should be banned from classrooms. - Insider
Polyglot texts (texts using multiple languages) have become increasingly common; they are salvos fired against arrogant monolingualism. Monolingual English speakers would do best to join the multilingual world and welcome these texts. - The Conversation
From the 18th century to the 21st, the stats keep rising — number of words, number of entries, number of volumes — and the rival publications proliferate: Compton’s, Caxton’s, Collier’s, Grolier’s, the Oxford and the Columbia, to name a few. - Washington Post
The editors of three science fiction magazines — Clarkesworld, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Asimov’s Science Fiction — said this week that they had been flooded by submissions of works of fiction generated by A.I. chatbots. - The New York Times
Clarkesworld publisher Neil Clarke says some people submitting AI content are "listening to all these experts on TikTok and YouTube that say, ‘Hey, you can make some money, just pop this into ChatGPT and then submit the text to this list of sites.’" - BuzzFeed
"The war has been going on since 2014, but it wasn’t until the full-scale invasion of February 2022 that the world started paying attention. Or, perhaps, as some of the poets in the anthology state elsewhere, the war began long before 2014 by way of colonial imperial politics." - LitHub
It's a thorny question after years of occupations and wars. That, "combined with the systematic repression of the Ukrainian language and Ukrainian culture has made some Ukrainians ambivalent about fully embracing the many writers from Ukraine who are not ethnic Ukrainians." - The Millions
This is a twist. "The Archer City store was the last remaining shopfront, and had become a pilgrimage of sorts for devotees of McMurtry’s Westerns." Gaines was spotted carrying boxes of books out of the store, the inventory of which has now gone all-online. - LitHub
"What's interesting about this unneeded controversy is that I haven't so far seen anybody ... who thinks (bowdlerizing the books) is a good idea. Loudmouths on the right think it's 'woke cancel culture' nonsense, and loudmouths on the left think it smacks of literary censorship. So why has this happened?" - Slate
