“The first thing customers see when they walk into the Strand Book Store in Manhattan is a table of anonymous books with covers wrapped like Christmas presents and titles replaced by vague descriptions.” Customers are loving this new marketing technique. - The New York Times
Anne Michaels, author of the spare, gorgeous Held says, "You can use brutal language to describe brutality, but that’s a lie; language can’t represent brutality. It’s exactly the same when I’m trying to get at the most beautiful, profoundly intense experience of intimacy.” - The Guardian (UK)
For such a self-professed grump, she never left a reader hanging after a seemingly desultory setup. There was always a reward. And the jokes still work. - The New Yorker
A recent Nielsen BookData and GfK Entertainment report on global book sales for the first eight months of the year shows “rising revenues in fiction, while sales of nonfiction books are declining in many regions. The TikTok community BookTok is playing an increasingly important role.” - Publishers Weekly
During her 11-year term, Suzanne Nossel, who was previously a top exec at Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International USA, oversaw a major expansion of PEN America's activities and the sextupling of its budget — as well as furious arguments among the membership over the war in Gaza. - Publishers Weekly
"The word, used by singer Charli XCX as the title of her sixth studio album, has been defined as 'characterized by a confident, independent, and hedonistic attitude.' Collins lexicographers said on Friday that in the phrase 'brat summer,' it became 'one of the most talked about words of 2024.'" - AP
I think this is important: memories and ideas happen in a place. An essay is a place for ideas; it has to feel like a place. It has to give one the feeling of entering a room. - The Georgia Review
"The Star-Ledger, Times of Trenton and South Jersey Times will all move to online-only editions. … But because the Ledger will shut down its plant in Montville, New Jersey, the long-running Jersey Journal" — which covers the cities across the Hudson from Manhattan — "will shut down entirely after 157 years of operation." - Gothamist
The 18th edition of the now-118-year-old guide has expanded sections on copyright, inclusive language (yes, it endorses the singular "they"), and how to credit non-text-based media and material generated by artificial intelligence. - Los Angeles Review of Books
Just the last few decades, hundreds of thousands of people speaking hundreds of languages have arrived in New York from heavily minority and Indigenous zones of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. At the very moment when languages worldwide are disappearing at an unprecedented rate, many of the last speakers are on the move. - LitHub
The phenomenon — in which bookstores open at midnight on a title's release date, so readers can get their fix as quickly as possible — started with the Harry Potter and Twilight series. Now publishers of serious literature are picking up the practice for some hotly-anticipated novels. - Publishers Weekly
Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell blurred the lines - long-listed for the Booker, won a Hugo - but the author herself, not too long after the surprisingly, epically popular novel came out, collapsed, unable to write for years. - The New York Times
“Of course the death of Charlotte was horribly sad, but far worse in my opinion was the moment when, during Wilbur the Pig’s hour of greatest need, the girl who owned him decided she’d rather go on the ferris wheel with Henry Fussy.” - The Guardian (UK)
“Reading books is a battle in a way that, once upon a time, it wasn’t. That is to say: it’s never a battle while I’m inside the activity itself but granting myself permission to get inside it can be.” - Tom Cox
