The hyperbole on book jackets—both the plot summaries and the lists of adulatory adjectives that go with them—have long frustrated authors, but no one would dispute that a good blurb has crucial functions. - Prospect
"I want to say, of course literature is just as important , but this is something in the dead of night I kind of worry about. … I've been saying for years, if you take away reading, take away literature, you take away something very, very important in the way we human beings communicate with each other. … We've...
Beginning in 1744, he published about 100 storybooks for children, plus magazines and “ABC” books, becoming the leading children’s publisher of his time. - Washington Post
"The word 'blurb' was coined in 1907 by the comic writer Gelett Burgess but they have been around a long time. ... One of the first major carnivals of blurbery came in 1516, when, ahead of the publication of his satire Utopia, Thomas More wrote to his friend Erasmus, urging him to make sure the book 'be handsomely set...
Most novels feature characters with an assortment of different backgrounds, and this can require narrators to voice characters with identities very different from their own. - Slate
The shop, founded 21 years ago, was a much-loved part of the local community and contained tens of thousands of books in various languages covering everything from philosophy and art history to fiction and children’s books. - The Guardian
Should the quality of my English matter? Last month a big English literature prize went to a novel that was written in dialect, something rural and very primitive. And what about all that authentic literature “from the streets”? N+1
Shelving exemplifies “two tensions, one which sets a premium on letting things be, on a good-natured anarchy, the other that exalts the virtues of the tabula rasa, the cold efficiency of the great arranging, one always ends by trying to set one’s books in order.” - Washington Post
Almost entirely inaccessible since 1939, the library was put together by Victorian industrialists William and Alfred Law at the turn of the 20th century, and is a literary treasure trove that had experts dancing with excitement. - The Guardian
The way Internet Literature treats its relationship to the world—and the anxiety of that treatment—is what distinguishes it as a form, and that goes straight to the heart of what distinguishes the Internet itself as a technology: the link. - LitHub
"Eight years after it bought McGraw-Hill Education for $2.4 billion, Apollo Global Management has reached an agreement to sell the company to another private equity firm, Platinum Equity, for $4.5 billion. The proposed purchase comes about a year after MH and Cengage called off their merger following opposition from the Justice Department." - Publishers Weekly
"After a protracted battle that nearly led to a workers strike, the staffers at three Condé Nast publications — The New Yorker, Ars Technica and Pitchfork — have come to an agreement on their first union contracts. … In the end, the unions got what they wanted. They secured salary floors of $55,000 a year upon the contracts' ratification...
“We all know people who we think are so cool, or interesting, or exciting, but a lot of times those stories vanish if no one is there to tell them.” - Poynter
