As of November 3, Lee Enterprises is ceasing seven-day-a-week print editions at all of its papers that hadn’t already done so. Those titles include the St. Louis-Post Dispatch, Omaha World-Herald, Lincoln Journal Star, Buffalo News, Quad City Times (Iowa/Illinois) and Richmond Times-Dispatch. - MediaPost
Fiction by Rabih Alameddine, Megha Majumdar and Karen Russell and a memoir of family tragedy by Yiyun Li are among … five nominees in each of five competitive categories. ... Winners, each of whom receive $10,000, will be revealed during a Nov. 19 dinner gala in downtown Manhattan.” - AP
“How can you write in a way that shows somebody working day after day on a piece of work?” asks Richard Holmes, with the triumphant twinkle of someone who has an answer to his own question. “How do you actually narrate that?” - The New Statesman
“In the long, ignominious history of American book banning, portrayals of sex have been cited again and again as beyond the pale for schools and libraries, but in recent years the list of forbidden topics has grown.” - The Atlantic
Andrea Bartz “was furious that the writing she had labored over for years got vacuumed up and fed into an algorithm, without her permission.” Then she (and others) did something about it. - The New York Times
Romancelandia is big, and “the rest of the industry wants to emulate this success, but as many editors know, chasing a trend can be a futile endeavor.” Imagine “HistoryLandia” or “BookerNomineeLandia.” - The Atlantic
Of course all, or at least many, books are cool. But the Goldsmiths Prize is for fiction that “breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form.” - The Guardian (UK)
Becoming the (at the time) youngest person to win the Booker Prize wasn’t all fun and games for the novelist, and it took her nearly 20 years to produce another novel. - Irish Times
"If The Best American Poetry captures ‘the zeitgeist of the current attitudes in American poetry,’ we should be asking: Why are those attitudes so fucked up?” - The Defector (Archive Today)
“‘I love Shakespeare,’ Swift said earnestly during the movie, and then made fun of herself for saying something so obvious. ‘It holds up! It’s actually not overhyped.’” - Washington Post (Yahoo)
“It’s been nearly 50 years since punk first set out to smash the vanity and artifice of rock-and-roll. … What a beautiful thrill to see the same demystification tactics being set loose on the self-aggrandizing bloat and pomp of the rock memoir.” - Washington Post (MSN)
Swift’s satirical suggestion that Ireland’s poor breed their children as food for elites wasn’t really an attack on the English (even though he suggested that England would “swallow up” the entire Irish nation if it could). Swift’s actual target was the Irish landowning class and its catastrophic choices about farmland. - JSTOR Daily
PEN America, which has filed a lawsuit challenging removals in the state, reported Florida had more than 2,300 titles pulled from campus shelves last school year. - WUWF
I’ve worked in multiple bookstores (and have moved too many books, too many times) so I understand that 100,000 books is, indeed, a lot of books. But how does that compare to your average corner bookstore, or your big old boxstore, or your little town library, or the largest library in the world? - LitHub
