Words

“Diop, the author of two novels, and his translator Anna Moschovakis, split the £50,000 annual prize, which goes to the best author and translator of a work translated into English. At Night All Blood Is Black follows Alfa Ndiaye, a Senegalese soldier fighting for France in the first world war, whose descent into madness after the death of a childhood friend on the frontline begins to show itself in extreme brutality against enemy German soldiers in the trenches.” – The Guardian

Though “Asian fantasy” has been exploding in popularity as a sub-genre of science fiction and fantasy, not all authors think that’s a good categorization. R.F. Kuang, of the tremendous The Poppy War trilogy, says the name “doesn’t really make a lot of sense, either as a literary category or as an identity category. Obviously, there are a lot of different things that fall under the subcategory of Asian, including East Asian, including South Asians, Southeast Asian, Pacific Islander, for example. … So when we call works just blanket ‘Asian,’ that belies an entire world of difference.” – NPR

“The Internet’s favorite catalog of weird places” (as the headline fittingly describes it) is going through what it’s calling (for lack of a term that’s both better and more timely) a “decolonization project” — reviewing its thousands of listings and hundreds of articles to include the roles and viewpoints of Black, indigenous, and and other Americans traditionally overlooked. But, says editorial director Samir S. Patel, “decolonizing” isn’t the right word: “Decolonization suggests removal, and that’s not what we’re doing. Adding this kind of perspective to travel and travel writing makes it less boring.” – The New York Times

Here’s the story of a set of seven comic strips, called “the Hagemeyer strips” after their main character, set in an office, with protagonists who seem an awful lot like grownup versions of Charlie Brown and Lucy Van Pelt. (Poor Charlie Brown — the Lucy character is his boss.) – The Washington Post

The first, Mary E. Jones Parrish, was a relative newcomer to Tulsa when the events of May 31, 1921, went down. She was an educator, but “the massacre compelled her to become a journalist and author, writing down her own experiences and collecting the accounts of many others. Her book Events of the Tulsa Disaster, published in 1923, was the first and most visceral long-form account of how Greenwood residents experienced the massacre.” – The New Yorker

How many archives are being plundered for private profit? Probably quite a few – and only librarians and academics seem to care. – The Daily Beast

Author Valeria Luiselli just won the Dublin literary award. She says that she, her daughter, and her niece have been reading out loud to each other since the pandemic began. “I can say, without a hint of doubt, that without books – without sharing in the company of other writers’s human experiences – we would not have made it through these months. If our spirits have found renewal, if we have found strength to carry on, if we have maintained a sense of enthusiasm for life, it is thanks to the worlds that books have given us.” – The Guardian (UK)

The history of the New York Times Book Review is pretty interesting for word nerds. “Although photos already appeared in other parts of the paper, these came only later to the Book Review. The publication turned instead to typography — some of it quite fanciful — to set its distinctive-looking pages apart.” – The New York Times

And, as his five-year run writing for the comic series comes to an end, what it did for him. “Coates decided early on he wanted to see how Wakanda truly became the technologically unmatched African ideal, which meant looking in the closet for skeletons.” – Washington Post

You ready for 75 nonfiction books in 90 days? (Oddly, LitHub also has recommendations for a mere 38 fiction works in the summer, but hey, perhaps fiction is slower than nonfiction for some people?) On your marks, as Memorial Day approaches. Get set! Hit up your local indie bookshop … and … GO. – LitHub

Curve began its life as Deneuve, a lesbian magazine founded by a 23-year-old who gambled all her money on horse races, won, and used the proceeds to start the mag. There’s a new movie documenting its evolution, and how different things might be in 2021. Franco Stevens: “Once I came back from the Book Fair in Chicago, walked into my office, and there was a stack of Polaroids on my desk. Apparently, there was a ‘leather day’ at the office when I was gone, and they were all posed on my desk, scantily clad in leather attire. When some of the staff came back from festivals where clothing was optional, I’d be like, ‘Can you just keep a bra on or something?'” – The Guardian (UK)

“The manuscript, Murder at Full Moon, was completed in 1930 but was never published. A single copy has been sitting, mostly forgotten, in an archive in Texas since 1969. It includes drawings by Steinbeck himself. A scholar of American literature at Stanford University is pushing for the book to be published, but the agents for Steinbeck’s estate vehemently refused this week.” – The New York Times

Having decided that the old reference works, still in use in English schools and universities, were too “antiquated” to work from, the editors of the new Cambridge Greek Lexicon spent 23 years going over virtually every surviving piece of ancient Hellenic writing back to Homer and up to circa 120 AD. “The new dictionary’s editors ‘spare no blushes’, [lead editor James] Diggle said, when it comes to the words that ‘brought a blush to Victorian cheeks’.” – The Guardian

“The collection was put together by Arthur Bell Nicholls, the widower of Charlotte, who of the six Brontë children lived the longest, dying in 1855 at the age of 38. Nicholls sold the majority of the surviving Brontë manuscripts in 1895 to the notorious bibliophile and literary forger Thomas James Wise. The collectors and brothers Alfred and William Law … then acquired some of the family’s heirlooms from Wise … The Law brothers’ library at Honresfield House disappeared from public view when their nephew and heir Alfred Law died in 1939, and was inaccessible even to academics.” – The Guardian

In his new book, “Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020,” Rushdie attempts to perform a defensive castling move. He suggests his work has been misunderstood and mistreated because the literary culture has turned from brio-filled imaginative writing toward the humbler delights of “autofiction,” as exemplified by the work of Elena Ferrante and Karl Ove Knausgaard. – The New York Times

“The ubiquity of social media is often offered up as a solution to the paucity of mainstream book criticism. While it is no longer possible to earn a living as a working critic, the internet has provided us with arguably more amateur criticism than at any other point in history, from BookTube to Bookstagram to Twitter Books. But the vast majority of this coverage goes unrecognized by a large swath of the reading public, with individual commentators usually maintaining small, fragmented audiences that are frequently genre-specific or otherwise limited in scope.” – The Walrus

Rogers: “When I started work on Mr Wroe’s Virgins I was 35. I was wildly ambitious, and had a chip on my shoulder. Faber had published my first three novels and all had found critical favour. But I was broke and my sales were poor, and I was spiky about the literary world.” – The Guardian (UK)

“The beloved Samir Mansour Bookshop was destroyed on Tuesday by an Israeli airstrike. The shop, which was established in 2008, had thousands of books, including the largest collection of English literature in Gaza, and was also part of a publishing house that focused on Palestinian writers.” Israel claimed the strike’s purpose was to destroy Hamas tunnels. – LitHub

It’s not always obvious or a direct line. Start with a good story. Characters that lift off the page. And then it gets complicated. – LitHub

“As the field’s most famous practitioner, and a dedicated anti-racist and feminist, Mary Beard takes a middle position: she believes neither that classics deserves a pedestal nor that it must be destroyed. Recently, in conversation, Beard defended her stance—and spoke about feminist translations, Internet manners, and the fluid properties of the canon.” – The New Yorker

“Major publishers have created special collections to promote first-time authors and ethnic minorities while new publishing houses are opening the field to a larger spectrum of writers, styles, and subject matter. … In parallel, writing workshops and graduate degrees in creative writing – once seen as a North American concept – are popping up around the country and acting as gateways to publication for burgeoning writers. Taken together, these efforts are forcing change in an industry steeped in tradition and pushing French literature to represent the reality of its diverse society.” – The Christian Science Monitor

“By noon, a dozen poets had arrived. Several paced the sneaker section, frantically whispering their metaphors, anaphoras, and onomatopoeias to themselves; others scrolled TikTok. A few snapped approval as fellow-finalists recited pulsing trochees and accentual slant rhymes. Alex Guzman, a nervous sixteen-year-old who wore glasses held together with Scotch tape, wandered into an empty room at the back and bellowed his stanzas into the dark.” – The New Yorker

The deal represents a major step forward for the digital library market. Not only is Amazon Publishing finally making its digital content available to libraries, the deal gives libraries a range of models through which it can license the content, offering libraries the kind of flexibility librarians have long asked for from the major publishers. – Publishers Weekly