In 1993 — not long after Munro's daughter Andrea told her mother of the abuse and Munro chose to stay with her husband — the author published in The New Yorker a story titled "Vandals." Laura Miller analyzes the tale and finds a likely explanation (though not a justification) of Munro's choice. - Slate (MSN)
Two of them involve Legos. One is about a quilt, another about Dr. Frankenstein and his monster, and yet another is about industrialized agriculture, with English as a monocrop. - The Paris Review
Michael Andor Brodeur, whose day job is classical music critic for The Washington Post, was relieved when informed he would not be recording the audiobook of his memoir/cultural history Swole: The Making of Men and the Meaning of Muscle. Then he had to choose who would. - The Washington Post (MSN)
"Not once did I catch a whiff that (Reese) Witherspoon, (Jenna Bush) Hager, (Oprah) Winfrey, or any of the other celebrities are not die-hard readers. … While I fully believe that celebrities aren’t playing some nefarious game of imprint chess to benefit themselves, the pieces are still visible on the board." - Esquire
Where a photojournalist trades in photographs, a poetjournalist, according to Dworkin, would trade in “newspoems.” He could think of a few examples from the past: Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade, say, or O Captain! My Captain!, Walt Whitman’s lament of the assassination of President Lincoln. - NiemanLab
"A little more than three months after Small Press Distribution abruptly closed, leaving some 400 independent presses without a trade distributor, publishers and distributors alike are moving forward even as damage assessment continues. Approximately 25% of the stranded publishers have found new distributors." - Publishers Weekly
Apparently, the struggle to find the right word is real and has been for some time, because the Oxford English Dictionary has its own category for these terms, labelled “thing or person whose name is forgotten or unknown”. - The Conversation
By taking a similar look at "excess word usage" after LLM writing tools became widely available in late 2022, the researchers found that "the appearance of LLMs led to an abrupt increase in the frequency of certain style words" that was "unprecedented in both quality and quantity." - Ars Technica
“While the library patrons say removing the books constitutes an illegal government squelching of viewpoints, county officials have argued that they have broad authority to decide which books belong on library shelves.” The review may back the county. - AP (US News & World Report)
“Once a niche that independent booksellers largely ignored, romance is now the hottest thing in the book world. It is, by far, the top-selling fiction genre, and its success is reshaping not only the publishing industry, but the retail landscape as well.” - The New York Times
“Natalie Miroshnyk was at the Warsaw Book Fair for Ukrainian publisher Vivat when she heard that a Russian missile had hit her country’s biggest printing house, killing seven workers, injuring 22 others and destroying 50,000 books.” - Irish Times
Australia’s largest online bookseller announced the move on Wednesday, two weeks after it went into a voluntary suspension of share trading. - The Guardian
We make something more likely, more widely believed, by saying and repeating it. Our rhetoric encourages or discourages. Which is why sports teams chant a version of “I believe we will win.” - LitHub
