Can the physical, print book continue its run this year? Independent bookstores would really like books to keep selling, even when people aren't trapped at home. - BBC
Where were the limits exactly, in what was deemed to be a case of poetry plagiarism? How many lines that emerged while writing, any poet might ask, could be traced back to some half-remembered source? - LitHub
"In early-1950s America, Donald Webster Cory had probably the largest L.G.B.T. mailing list in the country, and maybe in the world." (Mr. Cory was not, strictly speaking, a real person.) - The New Yorker
"They show how Asians in different parts of the continent invent and exchange words within their own local contexts, then introduce these words to the rest of the English-speaking world, thus allowing the Korean wave to continue to ripple on the sea of English words." - BBC
"'Satire ... does not come with some kind of manifesto for a better world. It tells you what's wrong; it doesn't tell you what you should do.' So political satire often sets out to do as much damage as possible, to sweep away." - BBC
Audiobooks aren’t cheating. They aren’t a just-add-water shortcut to cheap intellectualism. For so many titles in this heyday of audio entertainment, it’s not crazy to ask the opposite: Compared to the depth that can be conveyed via audio, does the flat text version count? - The New York Times
The author of ten novels, born and raised on Zanzibar and resettled in England as a refugee in the 1960s, was cited for "his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents." - The Guardian
Charlotte Higgins: "It was by such steps" as well-timed leaks and carefully fanned disagreements "that the Booker became not just a book prize, but a heady tangle of arguments, controversy and speculation: a cultural institution." - The Guardian
Following this year's conflict-of-interest scandal (not the first), administrators of the Prix Goncourt have declared that any book by a family member or unmarried lover of a juror is ineligible and that jurors may not publish reviews of any semifinalist or finalist title. - Deutsche Welle
"A food memoir that examines a mother's schizophrenia. A novel about an author's book tour, and about growing up as a Black boy in the rural South. Poetry honoring migrants who drowned while trying to cross the Rio Grande." - The New York Times
Following Hachette's purchase this past summer of Workman Publishing, "there is a dearth of what can be called midsize publishers that fall between the Big Five and the many independent publishers with sales of $20 million or less." - Publishers Weekly
Let’s start with what should be obvious: email is a bad way to communicate. There’s the way it gives license to verbiage, turning simple conversations into an exchange of over-crafted essays. - Prospect
If what fiction most essentially is for us is a volume of commodified time, one of the most notorious facts of contemporary literary life is that there is so little time for it. - BookForum
